💎 Plastic / Reconstructive Aftercare
Flap Surgery Aftercare Instructions
A day-by-day recovery guide for flap surgery: what to expect, how to care for yourself, and when to call. Free to read and print.
Typical recovery: about 60 daysPlastic / Reconstructive
What to expect
Your Procedure Determines Your Care
- •This graft or flap reconstruction draft stays intentionally conditional because closure, reconstruction method, site, devices, and anesthesia change aftercare.
- •Your surgical team's exact written instructions are the source of truth for this procedure.
Do Not Borrow Another Procedure's Timeline
- •Drain removal, dressing changes, support garments, positioning, therapy, and return to activity require procedure-specific clinical decisions.
- •Contact the clinic if this plan does not match the operation, dressings, devices, or instructions you received.
Flap Surgery recovery, day by day
Day 0
Your graft or flap reconstruction protocol
- Use the exact written home-care instructions from your surgical team. This draft does not replace the operation-specific plan they approved for you.
- Treat the graft or flap, its bolster or protective dressing, and any donor site as separate care areas. Do not lift or disturb any of them unless your reconstructive team instructed you to.
- If you were discharged with a drain at the recipient or donor site, keep each one identified and follow the separate recording and care plan your team provided.
- Take only the medicines and doses in the plan from your surgeon or prescribing clinician. Ask before adding, stopping, or changing a medicine.
Driving, support, and position
- If you received sedation or general anesthesia, do not drive and follow the adult-escort and home-support plan from your surgical team.
- If you received local anesthesia only, drive only when your clinic says it is safe and the dressing, pain, vision, movement, and medicines do not impair you.
- Use the off-loading or elevation position your team prescribed for the graft or flap location. Positioning is site-specific.
Days 1-3
Protect the surgical area
- Do not place compression or pressure over a graft, flap, connection, or donor site unless the reconstructive team prescribed it for that exact area.
- Protect the reconstructed tissue from pressure, friction, stretching, heat, cold, and unapproved products while your team monitors blood flow and healing.
- Follow the clinic's closure-specific instructions for stitches, staples, Steri-Strips, skin glue, or an open wound. Do not treat these closures as interchangeable.
Watch the right details
- Contact the reconstructive team immediately about a graft or flap that becomes newly pale, dark, cool, congested-looking, or increasingly painful.
- Call the surgical team if a dressing becomes soaked, displaced, too tight, or wet before its planned change.
- Avoid soaking and do not start ointment, silicone, massage, or other wound products until the surgical team approves them for this closure and site.
Days 4-14
Procedure-specific follow-up
- Your team checks tissue appearance, the recipient site, and the donor site before changing dressings, activity, or pressure restrictions.
- Keep every scheduled wound, dressing, device, reconstruction, and therapy visit that applies to your operation.
- Do not advance lifting, exercise, driving, work, or other activity until your team clears that activity for this procedure.
Days 15-60
Continue the approved plan
- Continue wound, device, support, therapy, and activity instructions until the responsible clinical team changes them.
- Start scar care and sun protection only after the area is fully closed and your clinical team gives a site-specific plan.
- Ask for reassessment if pain, swelling, function, skin color, or the wound is getting worse instead of improving.
When to call your provider or 911
- •Call 911 now for trouble breathing, chest pain, fainting, confusion, or swelling of the face or throat
- •Call your surgical team promptly for bleeding that does not stop after following their pressure instructions or for rapidly increasing swelling
- •Call your surgical team for fever or chills, spreading redness or warmth, pus, new odor, wound opening, or pain that is worsening instead of improving
- •Call your reconstructive team immediately for a graft or flap that becomes unusually pale, dark, cold, congested-looking, or increasingly painful
When in doubt, call your clinic. For a medical emergency, call 911.
Recovery milestones
- Day 3
Early Surgical Review
Confirm the operation-specific dressing, wound, support, position, and medicine plan with the surgical team.
- Day 14
Procedure-Specific Follow-Up
Your team checks tissue appearance, the recipient site, and the donor site before changing dressings, activity, or pressure restrictions.
- Day 60
Recovery-Plan Review
The responsible clinical team reviews healing and decides whether restrictions, therapy, support, or scar care should change.
For clinics
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