Impact of Age on Postoperative Recovery Process of Patients (Abdominal Surgery)
Introduction
While working at the Orlando Health Facility as a student nurse, I had an opportunity to work with the doctors and other nurses in the surgical unit. However, I did observe a situation where a 12-year-old boy and a 65-year-old man were subjected to a similar procedure of abdominal surgery. One of the interesting things about the situation is the period of recovery between the two patients. While the young boy took only two weeks to fully recover, the elderly man took one month to fully recover. Even after the recovery period, the elderly man occasionally visited the facility to receive further treatment for other post-operation diseases, infections, and complications. Based on this situation, what could be the effects of age with regard to the recovery period of a patient from abdominal surgery?
Background
In most cases, when a patient is exposed to a surgical procedure, the common concern is always based on how long the patient might take before full recovery. This is a question that has a complex answer because each and every individual has a unique response based on the type of surgery that was done. There are various factors that will affect the period through which a patient recovers from surgery. This could be days, weeks, or even months. In most cases, the key aspect of these variations is the type of surgery. There are various surgeries that can be performed on a patient depending on his or her health concern. However, surgeries related to the heart normally take an average of 6 to 8 weeks before recovery. Open heart surgeries are normally sensitive and, in some cases, cardiac rehabilitation is required to facilitate the recovery process (Verghese & Kane, 2021). In these procedures, which take longer because of the deeper incision that goes through several layers of tissue, it might take a longer period of time for a patient to heal and fully recover. On the other hand, in cases of small incisions such as tonsillectomy procedures, the recovery period is normally around 2 or 3 days, with much of the basis being the care around the wound.
According to medical reports, the types of surgery procedures would vary based on the level of incision. Small incision surgeries will take a shorter period of time to heal compared to larger incision surgeries because the larger incision has a larger surface area of healing. A good example in this case is the comparison between the appendectomy procedure using the laparoscopic technique and using the open technique. Most patients or physicians will prefer the laparoscopic technique because it takes a short period of recovery compared to the open technique (Weinstein, Geller, Negussie, Baciu, & National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (U.S.), 2017).
Despite the fact that a lot of research has been done and several factors outlined with regard to the recovery period, fewer studies have considered age as a factor in the recovery period of patients after general surgeries. However, the age of a patient plays a critical role in the recovery of a patient, especially in surgical procedures. From the theoretical point of view, it is considered that younger patients are more likely to recover faster than older patients (Sozen, 2020). This is only proven to be true if the given patients do not have other sidelining factors such as level of illness, because a healthy surgery patient is more likely to bounce back than an ill surgery patient regardless of age. The basis of this research will be to investigate the impact of age on the postoperative recovery process of patients. The research will specifically look at abdominal surgery in young people between the ages of 9 to 16 years and the elderly over 60 years of age.