”We wanted to take a few minutes today to talk a little bit about Post-Operative Care Instructions for Eyelid surgery. Eyelid surgery, also known as Blepharoplasty.
The main things with eyelid surgery in the post-operative care and recovery period is keeping the eye moist and I’ve got Bianca one of our nurses here, capable nurses to help in demonstrating a few things we can do, but the most important thing for patients to remember is keeping the eye moist is critical.
After eyelid surgery, the lid itself is swollen and the eyelid functions a lot like a windshield wiper on acar. It is there to lay a nice even layer of tear film over the surface of the cornea which is the colored part of the eye, if you roll the iris and the pupil and the cornea when it dries when the eyelids are swollen it gets dry because the cornea doesn’t have a nice even layer of tear film, it’s like having a bad windshield wiper you see a sort of splotchy water across the windshield that makes difficult to see through it, and so the water is not evenly distributed with bad windshield wipers, it’s the same principle with eyelids that are swollen, they don’t lay a nice even layer of tear film.
So to overcome that, we’ll be giving patients drops, you’ll have eye drops in your eyes that you’ll use frequently as much as you want, actually you can’t use too many of these saline based eye drops. We’ll commonly give use an ointment to put in the eye at night to keep it nice and moist because when you’re sleeping you don’t have a lot of control over whether your eyes are open or closed and so we use the drops during the day a little bit of lacri-lube or natural tears ointment at night and that’s done. I’m going to just show you that right now.
We can kind of zoom in for Bianca and I’ll put this over for this so she can lay back.
So when we’re applying the ointment, I’m going to pretend like this is the ointment jar, I’ll take the eyelid and I’ll bring it forward a little bit and then I’ll take the tube of ointment and I’ll squirt it right along the bottom part of the eyelid. So if we can show that and zoom that in, I’m squirting the ointment right along the eyelid and a lot of times I’ll have the patients just look up. If you look up, you can see there’s a nice little space there where you can squirt it in without having to poke our own eyes. Very simple to do this in the mirror and look up for just a second and then we can do that and then blink the eye just a little bit and you’ll have a nice layer of ointment in there. I’m not going to do that for Bianca it will make her eyelids look a little blurry, although it’s quiet simple to do.
The next thing that we can do beyond the use of drops and the ointment is that we can make sure that the eyelids have their best chance of swelling reduction, and there’s a couple of ways to reduce swelling after eyelid surgery. One of them is obvious, it’s ice. So we’ll have patients as much as they can, keep some ice There’s a couple of little hints or clues or tricks that we use, one of them is the put corn or peas that there in the freezer and a little zip lock baggy. Those can be laid on the eyes very safely and you can take a nap, it won’t get too cold and won’t cause any problems. Another little trick is to take a zip lock baggy or even one of the gloves that we can give you, the little disposable surgery gloves, fill that with crushed ice, and then lay the fingers over the eyes. So those are two very good strategies for cooling the eyes if you will, and those will reduce swelling.
The other thing that later on we’ll have patients doing are eye exercises. So eye exercises are pretty simple and what we have the patient doing is opening the eyes real wide and then squeezing them real tightly shut and in the count of one and then they’ll open and close and I’ll have the people do that if you just repeat that for just a few seconds. Open real wide, close real tight, open real wide, close real tight and if you do that a couple of times a day for about 5 minutes you really helping to regain that muscle activity in the upper eyelid that’s disturbed after surgery and to get the muscle tone back, as well as kind of pump the eyelids and get that lids swelling out of there.
So again for eyelid swelling two main features are icing the eyes, keeping them cool, and then the other one is of course the eye exercise. It’s very simple, opening and closing real tightly, a count of one both ends of the extortion, open and close.
The final thing I’d just like to say about eyelid surgery is that everybody has some degree of eye irritation and the better the patient is, is taking care of their eyes in the immediate post-operative period with what we’ve talked about, icing the eyes, keeping them moist with eye drops and eye lubrication and finally at night if you can sleep with the head of the bed slightly elevated or having through four pillows underneath to keep your head up, it is a much more effective way of reducing the swelling and having your eyes comfortable after Blepharoplasty or Eyelid surgery.
So thanks for your attention on this, hopefully its helpful for everybody to keep their eyes comfortable. Anytime someone has a question our phone number is 24/7 available do not hesitate to call. It’s in all of our post-operative care instruction materials.
As always Dr. Maas on Looking your Best.”
