Post-Surgery Care at Home: A 7-Day Recovery Checklist
What to watch for in the first week after discharge — wound care, medication, mobility and the specific warning signs that mean you should call the doctor.
The riskiest part of most operations is not the surgery. It is the fortnight afterwards, at home, when the surgical team is no longer watching and the discharge instructions have been handed to a family with no clinical training.
Most readmissions in that window come down to four things: wound infection, medication errors, chest complications from immobility, and falls. All four are largely preventable with structured attention. Here is what that looks like day by day.
This is general guidance. Your surgeon's specific instructions always take precedence.
Before you leave the hospital
Get these in writing, and do not leave without them:
- The wound care schedule — how often, what dressing, when the sutures come out
- A medication list with dose and timing, and which pre-surgery medicines to restart
- Mobility instructions — what weight-bearing is allowed, what is forbidden
- Diet restrictions and when normal eating resumes
- Warning signs specific to this surgery
- A follow-up appointment date and a number to call out of hours
Days 1–2: the highest-risk window
Wound. Keep the dressing dry and intact. Do not remove it to look unless instructed. Bleeding that soaks through a dressing needs a call.
Pain. Take pain medication on schedule, not when the pain becomes unbearable. Patients who under-medicate move less, and patients who move less get chest infections and clots. Pain control is not indulgence; it is part of the treatment.
Mobility. Most surgeons want patients sitting up and taking a few steps within 24 hours. Early mobilisation prevents clots and pneumonia. Do exactly what your surgeon specified — no more, no less.
Watch for: fever above 38°C, heavy bleeding, severe unrelieved pain, chest pain, breathlessness.
Days 3–4: infection watch
This is when wound infection typically declares itself.
Inspect at each dressing change for increasing redness spreading from the wound, swelling and warmth, discharge, especially cloudy or foul-smelling, increasing rather than decreasing pain, and fever.
Some redness at the wound edge is normal. Redness that is expanding day on day is not. The distinction is the reason someone should be looking at the wound properly at every change rather than glancing at it.
Bowels. Anaesthesia and opioids cause constipation, and straining is genuinely dangerous after abdominal surgery. If there has been no bowel movement by day three, ask about a stool softener.
Days 5–7: building up
Mobility should be increasing. Appetite should be returning. Pain should be reducing and pain medication tapering.
What should worry you at this stage: pain that is increasing rather than decreasing, a wound looking worse than it did on day three, fever appearing after several normal days, or calf pain and swelling — which needs same-day assessment for a clot.
Call your doctor immediately for
- Fever above 38°C
- Wound redness spreading, or pus
- Chest pain or shortness of breath
- Calf pain, swelling or redness
- Inability to pass urine
- Persistent vomiting
- Sudden severe pain
Where home care earns its cost
Families managing this alone are trying to interpret a wound they have never seen before while also handling medication, feeding and mobility on no sleep.
A medical attendant for post-operative care performs sterile dressing changes on schedule, assesses the wound at every change against what it looked like yesterday, keeps the medication timings right, supervises mobilisation at the pace the surgeon set, monitors vitals for the signs that matter, and escalates early.
Many families book 24-hour cover for the first week and step down to a 12-hour shift in week two. If the only ongoing need is the dressing itself, a one-off wound dressing visit at ₹599 is the more sensible option.
For structured rehabilitation after orthopaedic surgery, physiotherapy at home removes the main reason prescribed rehab fails — the patient stops travelling to the clinic.
The first 72 hours home carry the highest risk. Cover from day one is worth considerably more than cover arranged a week later, after something has already gone wrong.