Recovery after surgery: Help make it a success
By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, Author of Your Labs Are Fine. You're Not
Updated September 2026
For anyone recovering at home after an operation, and for the people looking after them.
Feel
You are home, and you are more tired than you expected to be. Sleep does not seem to fix it. Getting to the bathroom takes something out of you that it did not take last month. The incision hurts, and you have no way of knowing whether it hurts the amount it is supposed to hurt. Your appetite may be off. Personal hygiene such as showering and brushing your teeth may feel like moving a mountain. You may feel flatter than usual, which nobody mentioned could happen. And underneath all of it is the reluctance to call the doctor's office about something that you may think is probably nothing. Don’t be so dramatic, right?
No, your feelings are valid.
Pause
The operation was the part with a date on it. What happens afterward is what determines whether the operation worked or not.
Your body is running a repair job, and it is expensive. Energy that normally goes into walking around and thinking clearly is going into healing tissue instead. That accounts for most of the tiredness, and it is why the tiredness does not behave like ordinary tiredness.
The problems that show up after surgery are known ones, and your surgical team is watching for them: fever and infection, weakness that makes moving difficult, an infection picked up in the hospital, strain on other systems such as the heart or the kidneys, pain, nausea and vomiting, poor appetite, and low mood. That list is the checklist your doctor is running through while you sit in the office thinking the appointment is routine.
Underneath almost every worry in recovery is one question: is this the ordinary course, or is this a change? Three things separate them.
Is it moving? Ordinary recovery is uneven day to day but trends in one direction over a week. Something that is worse than it was three days ago is a change.
Is it new? A symptom that was not there yesterday is worth a phone call, even a small one.
Does it match what you were told? Your surgical team told you what to expect and what to watch for, usually in writing, usually while you were groggy. If you cannot find that paper, call and ask for another copy. It is the only baseline you have.
The reason these questions are hard to answer alone is that you have never recovered from this operation before. Your doctor has seen hundreds of them.
About vitamin D. You will read that vitamin D helps you recover from surgery.
A 2014 study looked back at 3,509 patients who had noncardiac surgery and found that those with higher vitamin D levels had lower odds of dying in the hospital, getting a serious infection, or having a serious cardiac event. Most of that difference sat between the lowest group and everyone else. Its authors said the design could not show cause and called for a randomized trial.
Cause matters here for a specific reason. People with low vitamin D also tend to be heavier, frailer, or sicker to begin with, and those things affect how surgery goes on their own.
A 2024 review of fourteen randomized trials, covering 1,982 patients, found no clear evidence that supplementation improved survival, reduced deaths after surgery, or shortened hospital or intensive care stays. The evidence underneath that finding is thin. Only one of the fourteen trials measured long-term survival. The trials were too different from one another to be combined statistically at all. And most of them started the vitamin D within days or a few weeks of the operation, which the reviewers said is likely too late to change anyone's actual level, since that takes months of daily dosing.
So the association is real, the confounding is real, and the trials meant to settle it were not built to. Taking vitamin D in the week before your operation is not a recovery strategy. Whether your level is worth knowing at all is a separate conversation with your doctor, for separate reasons.
Act
Keep every follow-up appointment, including the ones that feel pointless. The appointment that seems uneventful is the one where your doctor is checking against the list.
Get your instructions in writing, and bring someone with you. If you are in pain or still foggy from anesthesia, you will not retain what you are told. Designate a family member or friend to take it down. The generic handout will not cover everything specific to you, so ask until you understand. No question is too small.
Report changes instead of deciding they are nothing. Use the warning signs your surgical team gave you at discharge. If you do not have that list, call and ask for it. Doctors would far rather take an unnecessary call than find out two weeks later that something was building.
Move as soon as you are cleared, and only as much as you are cleared for. If physical therapy was ordered, go. Movement is part of the treatment.
Eat and drink on a schedule rather than by appetite. Appetite is often poor after surgery, so waiting until you feel like eating means eating too little. If your appetite has not returned after several days, tell your care team.
Do not go back to work on the original timeline if you are not ready. Going back early and having to stop again costs more than going back late.
Let people help. You will be doing this for one of them eventually.
Questions to ask your doctor
What should my recovery look like week by week, and at what point should I be concerned?
Which symptoms mean call the office, and which mean go to the emergency room?
When can I drive, lift, shower, and go back to work?
Are any of my regular medications on hold, and when do I restart them?
Is my appetite or my mood something you want to know about, or is it expected at this stage?
Doctors may be experts, but you are the expert on your body. No one lives in your body but you. Sit with your feelings, trust your intuition and listen to what your body needs. Recovery is more than a timeline and checks on a list, and it is mental as well as physical.
(Joy Stephenson-Laws is the founder of Proactive Health Labs and author of From Chains to Wings and Your Labs Are Fine. You're Not. She writes about the space between what your body tells you and what you do about it).
Sources
Turan A, Hesler BD, You J, et al. The association of serum vitamin D concentration with serious complications after noncardiac surgery. Anesthesia and Analgesia. 2014;119(3):603-612.https://doi.org/10.1213/ANE.0000000000000096
Patel A, Caruana EJ, Hodson J, et al. Role of vitamin D supplementation in modifying outcomes after surgery: a systematic review of randomised controlled trials. BMJ Open. 2024;14(1):e073431.https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2023-073431
Article records retrieved from PubMed.
