Dr. Robert Schwartz - The Plastic Surgery Blog

The Best Thing Ever for Tummy Tuck Recovery

by Dr. Robert Schwartz on December 27th, 2007

Are you hesitant to have a tummy tuck because you’re afraid of pain during recovery? Tummy tucks (also called abdominoplasty) have a reputation as the the most painful of all cosmetic surgeries. I used to keep my tummy tuck patients in the hospital overnight so I could give them morphine for pain. Intravenous morphine. For the last four years, though, I’ve let my patients go home after surgery with only pain pills. And many patients don’t even take the pills.

Pain pumps are what made this huge change possible. Specifically, local anesthetic pain pumps. To understand how these work so well for tummy tucks, we first need to discuss where tummy tuck pain comes from.

The part of the tummy tuck that hurts is the muscle tightening. This is where the plastic surgeon sutures the rectus abdominus (six-pack muscles) to tighten them. You can picture this as someone lacing and tightening an old-style corset except that you’re the corset. Very effective for flattening the tummy but ouch! You can understand why it would hurt.

The pain pump consists of a catheter about as thin as a piece of string. The catheter lays along the muscle exactly where it’s stitched tighter. It comes out through the skin on the abdomen. (The hole is tiny and I have yet to see one heal with a noticeable scar.) On the outside the catheter connects to a small pump that looks like a thick-walled balloon about the size of a baseball. The plastic surgeon fills the pump with local anesthetic. The pump then slowly pushes the anesthetic through the catheter and drips it onto the abdominal muscles for about four days.

That means that for the first four days of your recovery your muscles - the part of the tummy tuck that hurts - are numb. You feel little of the pain that comes from tightening them. The difference is dramatic. Like I said - some patients don’t even take their pain pills.

Is the pain pump really the best thing ever for tummy tuck recovery? I don’t know but I can’t think of anything better. And I wouldn’t do a tummy tuck without one.

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