After your child's umbilical hernia repair

So what do you do after your child's had an umbilical hernia repaired? I'm Dr. Alan Greene with some tips for home care after that operation. Well, the first thing to know is that your child will probably go home with a bandage over the surgical site that's best to leave in place until your return visit to the doctor or until your doctor tells you to take it off. And while that bandage is there you want to keep that area pretty dry. That means usually sponge baths, not real bathing, not swimming certainly until it's time for that bandage to come off. Your doctor probably will give some pain medication for your child, especially that first couple days it can be pretty tender afterwards, so it's nice to give that pain medication around the clock when they're awake to kind of stay ahead of the pain instead of waiting until you know that they're uncomfortable.

They can pretty well eat what they want once they go home and more or less normal activity. You'll want it kind of quiet for the first 3 or 4 days, but after that they can resume completely normal activity except for rough sports - you probably want to hold off for about a week or so to let that incision really strengthen.

When should you call the doctor? It's a good idea to call the doctor if your child develops a new fever sometime afterwards over 101° or so. If their pain is increasing at any point or if they're having trouble urinating would be another reason. If vomiting or nausea develops in the couple of days after surgery. If there's an increase in redness or if it looks to you after the bandage comes off that the wound seems to be coming apart would all be reasons to get back in touch with the doctor. Most children with this operation though have no complications and if there are complications they're pretty easily dealt with. So, enjoy this quiet time with your child and then enjoy getting right back to regular activity sometime in the next week.

After your child's umbilical hernia repair

BookmarkBookmark

Review Date: 1/17/2025

Reviewed By: Robert A. Cowles, MD, Professor of Surgery (Pediatrics), Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David C. Dugdale, MD, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.

The information provided herein should not be used during any medical emergency or for the diagnosis or treatment of any medical condition. A licensed medical professional should be consulted for diagnosis and treatment of any and all medical conditions. Links to other sites are provided for information only -- they do not constitute endorsements of those other sites. No warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, is made as to the accuracy, reliability, timeliness, or correctness of any translations made by a third-party service of the information provided herein into any other language.

© 1997- A.D.A.M., a business unit of Ebix, Inc. Any duplication or distribution of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited.

All content on this site including text, images, graphics, audio, video, data, metadata, and compilations is protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. You may view the content for personal, noncommercial use. Any other use requires prior written consent from Ebix. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, display, publish, reverse-engineer, adapt, modify, store beyond ordinary browser caching, index, mine, scrape, or create derivative works from this content. You may not use automated tools to access or extract content, including to create embeddings, vectors, datasets, or indexes for retrieval systems. Use of any content for training, fine-tuning, calibrating, testing, evaluating, or improving AI systems of any kind is prohibited without express written consent. This includes large language models, machine learning models, neural networks, generative systems, retrieval-augmented systems, and any software that ingests content to produce outputs. Any unauthorized use of the content including AI-related use is a violation of our rights and may result in legal action, damages, and statutory penalties to the fullest extent permitted by law. Ebix reserves the right to enforce its rights through legal, technological, and contractual measures.

Animations

Browse All

Illustrations

Browse All

Presentations

Browse All