Is Heart Surgery Painful?

“Mujhe cheer phaad nahin chhahiye” (I don’t want to be torn apart) is a common refrain of some of my patients. Patients get scared and discouraged from the idea of heart surgery because of the large incision that is made. It is true that the breast bone must be cut to reach the heart; but contrary to popular belief, pain after heart surgery is not very severe at all.

How we deal with pain

My team is trained towards making sure the patient suffers the least amount of pain, through a variety of techniques employed during surgery itself aswell as during recovery. I won’t get into much detail of our procedures here. But yes, we use a variety of different painkillers depending on the age, case and extent of pain felt by the patient during the recovery stage to ensure their recovery is relatively pain free, and free of any complications.

My team looks at patients intently to check for signs of pain, we encourage our patients to let us know if and when they suffer any pain so we can go on about fixing it. Post-operative pain usually needs to be tended for a few weeks with painkillers, after which the pain usually weans off.