Questions for Your Endometriosis Post-Op Appointment
This guide will help you know what to ask during your endometriosis surgery post-op appointment.
Ask at the start whether you can record the conversation. Most of this appointment happens while you're still recovering and on pain medication, and people rarely remember it clearly afterward.
- What did you find, and where was it?
- What did you remove, and how did you remove it?
- Was there anything you couldn't safely address, and why?
- Did the pathology confirm endometriosis, and in which locations?
- Can we go through the operative report together, line by line?
- What should recovery look like, and what would be a reason to call you?
- When should I start pelvic floor physical therapy?
- If pain comes back, what does that mean and what do we do?
- How can I tell the difference between emergency pain and normal healing pain?
- Full Operative Report
- Pathology report
- Photos or video from during surgery
Operative reports are written for other doctors and they're full of terminology that's hard to decode on your own, so go through it a line at a time while you're both sitting there and stop them whenever something doesn't make sense.
Keep everything somewhere safe and don't rely on the practice to hold onto it. Records get lost, practices close, and surgeons move. These documents are the record of what was actually found and removed in your body, and every doctor you see after this will be better off for having them.