Breast cancer going in to hospital for an operation

BREAST CANCER: GOING IN TO HOSPITAL FOR AN OPERATION

 

For any type of breast surgery, you will probably be admitted to hospital as soon as possible after your clinic visit. This is due in most cases more to an understanding of the stress involved in waiting for women and their families, rather than to any urgent need for the operation to be done immediately.
You should get a letter from the hospital telling you the date of your operation and any other details you need to know. Many hospitals also send out leaflets explaining their admission procedures and giving advice on what to take in with you. If your hospital has a breast care or other specialist nurse, she will also send you details of any specific information that may be useful.
You may have been put on a shortlist so that if an unexpected gap occurs in the operating schedule, you will be asked to come in at short notice - possibly within a day or two.

Length of stay
Your length of stay in hospital will depend on the type of operation you are having.
For a lumpectomy involving the simple removal of a small breast lump, day-case surgery may be appropriate. Otherwise, an overnight stay is all that is likely to be necessary following this operation. Women having a wide lump excision to remove a breast lump and some auxiliary lymph nodes will probably have to stay in hospital for a couple of days. For those having a more extensive mastectomy operation, the stay will be at least 3 to 4 days, and at some hospitals up to 8 days.
During the operation, one or two small tubes may be inserted into your wound to drain any blood or fluid which collects after the tissues have been cut and which cannot escape once the wound has been sewn. After anything from 1 to 7 days, the fluid usually stops draining and the drainage tubes can be removed. You will have to stay in hospital until this has occurred.

Day-case surgery
If you are a young woman having a lumpectomy, and are fit and healthy, the consultant may have suggested at your outpatient's appointment that you be treated as a day case.
Day-case surgery is being used increasingly for straightforward operations of this sort, and will be even more common when the Government's proposed reduction in the number of hospital beds comes into effect. The average cost of an operation involving an overnight stay in hospital is approximately three to four times greater than the cost of the operation done as a day case. Now that hospital expenditure is a major consideration, day-case surgery is seen as a sensible way of cutting costs and reducing the length of waiting lists.
You will be admitted to hospital an hour or two before your operation and will leave again a few hours after you have recovered from the anesthetic.
Patients have to be screened very carefully by medical staff to make sure that only those whose general health is good are selected as day cases. Women over the age of 50 are usually considered to be unsuitable for this type of surgery as health problems are more common in this age group, and therefore pre-operative tests such as chest X-rays and electrocardiograms (ECGs) may be needed. These tests can sometimes be done by a GP a week or two before the operation so that the time in hospital is kept to a minimum. Alternatively, the tests may be carried out at the out-patients' clinic or other designated area so that your medical history, examination and investigation results can be collated by a hospital doctor. This is called the 'pre-clerking admissions procedure'.

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