When to call your doctor after weight-loss surgery

Description

You will lose weight quickly over the first 3 to 6 months. During this time, you may have body aches, feel tired and cold, or have dry skin, mood changes, and hair loss or hair thinning. These problems should go away as you take in more protein, as your body gets used to your weight loss, and your weight becomes stable. Weight loss slows down after about 12 months. You will likely feel colder than usual during the winter after surgery.

In the days to weeks after your surgery, call your health care provider if:

Your temperature is above 100°F (37.7°C) for more than 4 hours.

You see any of these changes around your incision:

  • More redness
  • More pain
  • Swelling
  • Bleeding
  • The wound is larger or deeper

The drainage coming from or around your incision:

  • Is increasing
  • Becomes thick, tan, or yellow, or smells bad (pus)

Also call your provider if:

  • You have pain that your pain medicine is not helping
  • You have trouble breathing
  • You have a cough that does not go away
  • You cannot drink or eat
  • Your skin or the white part of your eyes turns yellow
  • Your stools are loose, or you have diarrhea
  • You are vomiting after eating
  • You have leg pain or leg swelling

In the weeks to months after your surgery, call your provider if:

  • You are vomiting regularly after eating
  • You have chest pains or heartburn soon after eating
  • You have diarrhea that is not going away
  • You feel tired all the time
  • You have dizziness or are sweating
Rate This Page
Tell Us What you think
Review Date: 1/30/2018

Reviewed By: John E. Meilahn, MD, Bariatric Surgery, Chestnut Hill Surgical Associates, Philadelphia, PA. Review provided by VeriMed Healthcare Network. Also reviewed by David Zieve, MD, MHA, Medical Director, Brenda Conaway, Editorial Director, and the A.D.A.M. Editorial team.

View References: View References

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.


BACK
TO
TOP