My Shape Back

An abdominoplasty, week by week, from the decision through the long recovery.

A tummy tuck, week by week, as it really went.

The first two weeks

Forum · 3 threads

Hunched walking, drains, sleeping propped up, and the shock of the early days.

The first fortnight after an abdominoplasty has its own strange physics: you walk bent, sleep sitting up, measure your days in drain output, and wonder more than once whether you've made a terrible mistake. Everyone posting in this section has stood in that kitchen at 3am. It passes, and these threads are what it looked like while it did.

If you're in the middle of it right now

The reassurances that repeat through these threads are worth collecting in one place. The bent-over posture is protective, not a setback, and in almost every account here it resolved on its own somewhere between day eight and day fourteen, often abruptly. The lower back ache that comes with it is the posture, not a complication, and it fades when the posture does. Nobody straightened up by force of will, and nobody stayed bent.

Drains are the other constant. The numbers readers report vary enormously, and the discharge sheet's schedule turns out to be a guide rather than a deadline. The one piece of advice that never changes: questions about your output go to your surgical team, not to a comparison with a stranger's numbers. The teams expect those calls; every reader who rang says so.

Rebecca's diary of the first week covers this stretch in close detail, and the drains guide explains what's being measured and why. Anything sudden, bleeding, fever, one side ballooning, is a call to your team today, not a thread.