What is the expected recovery time after undergoing a carotid endarterectomy?

What's the expected recovery time for somebody having an endarterectomy? Again, so most of the patients who have a carotid endarterectomy will either be discharged, you know, very shortly after the procedure, i.e. the next day, or will be sent back to the stroke unit from where they were referred. The recovery time is really dictated by the degree of severity of the initial event. So, you know, if they've had a stroke which has resulted in weakness of the arms and legs or speech problems, it can take many months of physiotherapy to get around that problem, if at all. But again, that's very much dictated, as I said, by the initial event that prompted them to have the operation in the first place. In terms of the actual surgery itself, you do have a scar. Wounds take a number of days to close completely and then the scar itself can take a number of weeks to months to kind of become less angry and to mature and fade away into the background. So in terms of recovery from the local effects, that's actually fairly quick in my experience and usually doesn't tend to bother the patient population. Occasionally patients who have a carotid endarterectomy will develop a bleed or a hematoma and that's largely related to the fact that because of their stroke and the neurological events they've been placed on kind of double anti-platelet therapy or anti-stickiness medication to prevent clot building up during and around the time of the repair. But that obviously comes at a risk of hematoma and bruising. So again most hematomas tend to settle down, very rarely do they need evacuation.