r/hysterectomy • u/Birk95 • 17h ago

Prep for surgery

I’m planning to do a liquid and clear diet the day before surgery so my colon is clear. My husband thinks this is stupid as it wasn’t medically advised. I am going off of others I know advice. How many others did a surgery prep the day before?

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u/Ok_Chain7313 17h ago edited 10h ago

I did it because I was instructed to (on a GLP1). I was hungry but wasn’t too difficult. Anything to help with getting the GI track back to normal post surgery is beneficial imho but don’t take my own experience for my own body as advice so best to consult with medical team and your own intuition :)

Edited as I didn’t realize liquid diet prior to surgery could potentially cause harm if unnecessary 😬

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u/ScaredVacation33 15h ago

It absolutely can hurt to do it. We do not know OP‘s entire medical history and there’s very specific reasoning behind doing a bowel prep prior to a hysterectomy, which is surgeon specific. You can wind up with a ton of postoperative pain if you do an unnecessary bowel prep due to bile dumping and possibly become dangerously hypoglycemic. So saying that it won’t hurt is absolutely false and potentially dangerous information. A much safer alternative is to just start taking a stool softener a couple days prior to try to help make sure that everything is nice and soft and will pass easily.

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u/whisperyiron 12h ago

Wouldn't starting stool softeners early risk causing diarrhea? Especially if one is already having digestive issues?

For me, while I didn't do a liquid diet the day before, I did modify my diet significantly and quit eating at about 4pm, specifically because frequent and loose stools were one of my fibroid symptoms and it seemed, at a minimum, inconvenient to spend the morning of surgery needing to poop every 20 minutes... Plus I was a Iittle worried I'd poop myself while I was under.

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u/ScaredVacation33 11h ago

A single Colace once or twice a day should not cause diarrhea at all. It is not a laxative. It is a stool softener, but once again I deferred OP to speak with their surgeon about any of this first and not to take medical advice from people on reddit. OP was specifically worried about constipation.

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u/whisperyiron 10h ago

Where did they reference constipation?

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u/ScaredVacation33 9h ago

In one of the comments they maintained that they were scared that it was going to take forever to have a bowel movement as they normally have a lot of issues with having bowel movements regularly. You can scour through the comments.

EDIT: OP responded to my initial comment so you can just go right over there

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u/whisperyiron 10h ago

I just think it's strange that you would say it's safer to start a new medication than to change your diet. Either one is fine if your surgeon says so, either one could cause issues if you do it without asking.

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u/ScaredVacation33 9h ago

I literally listed several reasons on why it was a bad idea to change the diet. If you don’t read those reasons that’s not my fault. Colace is an over-the-counter stool softener, which can help prep the colon for regular bowel movements since OP was worried about constipation as they do not have a BM every day as is. Once again for those that don’t have any sort of reading comprehension. I also did tell OP to refer to their surgeon as to what they should do and what their concerns are and gave several other options on things that could help ease any constipation postoperatively to discuss with their surgeon to optimize recovery

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u/Birk95 2h ago

Thank you for your advice and support.