Perioperative Management: What You Need to Know Before, During, and After Surgery

When you’re scheduled for surgery, perioperative management, the coordinated care before, during, and after a surgical procedure. It’s not just about the operation—it’s about how your body handles the stress of surgery, how your meds interact with anesthesia, and what you do in the days leading up to and after the cut. Many people think surgery is a one-day event, but the real work happens in the weeks and hours around it. Poor perioperative management is one of the top reasons for complications, readmissions, and even preventable deaths.

It starts long before you’re wheeled into the OR. medication interactions, how your daily drugs react with anesthesia and surgical stressors can be deadly if ignored. Think CoQ10 lowering blood pressure too much, or warfarin users eating inconsistent amounts of spinach. Even something as simple as stopping your beta-blocker the night before can spike your heart rate during surgery. Then there’s anesthesia risks, the dangers tied to how your body responds to sedatives and painkillers. Mixing benzodiazepines with opioids? That’s a known recipe for breathing trouble. Diabetes patients need tight glucose control—not just to avoid high numbers, but because high blood sugar slows healing and increases infection risk. And if you’re on SSRIs, your surgeon needs to know: serotonin syndrome can flare up under anesthesia if not managed.

It’s not just about drugs. preoperative preparation, the steps you take to get your body ready for surgery matters just as much. Stopping smoking 4 weeks out? That cuts infection risk by half. Getting your blood pressure stable? That reduces bleeding. Even simple things like eating the right meal the night before, or skipping your morning pill, can change outcomes. And post-op? That’s not just recovery—it’s active management. Pain control that doesn’t mess with your breathing. Early movement to prevent clots. Watching for signs of infection before your first follow-up. These aren’t suggestions—they’re science-backed steps that save lives.

You’ll find real cases here: how someone with diabetic nephropathy avoided kidney stress during surgery, how a patient switched antidepressants safely before an operation, how a person on warfarin kept their INR stable while preparing for a procedure. These aren’t theoretical guides—they’re stories from people who navigated the system, got the right advice, and walked out of the hospital better than they went in. This collection cuts through the noise. No fluff. No vague warnings. Just what works, what doesn’t, and why.