Follow-up
About a week after returning from hospital to home, revisit your doctor for follow up. On this visit, your doctor will check your incision healing. After thyroid surgery, you may need regular blood tests to measure levels of thyroid hormone. They control the levels of calcium and phosphorus to evaluate the function of your parathyroid glands, which are sometimes damaged during thyroid surgery.
If the entire thyroid gland removed, you must take thyroid supplements for the rest of his life. More pain after surgery if you had a conventional thyroidectomy if you had an endoscopic thyroidectomy. However, most patients are not candidates for endoscopic thyroidectomy.
Risks
In general, thyroidectomy is a safe surgical procedure. However, some people have higher or lower risks, which include:
- Hemorrhage (bleeding) into the wound in the neck: if this happens, the stands and neck wound becomes inflamed, possibly compressing structures within the neck and interfering with breathing. This is a medical emergency.
- Thyroid storm, if the thyroidectomy is performed to treat an overactive thyroid (thyrotoxicosis) could be a surge of thyroid hormones in the blood. This is a very rare complication because they are medical patients before surgery to prevent this problem.
- Recurrent laryngeal nerve damage, since this nerve supplies the vocal cords, the damage can lead to paralysis of the vocal cords and produce a hoarse voice, either in the short or long term. In rare cases, if both vocal cords are paralyzed, it can obstruct the opening of the throat, causing breathing problems.
- Damage to a part of the superior laryngeal nerve: if this occurs, patients may not get to sing the high notes, and the voice may lose a bit of projection.
- Hypoparathyroidism: if parathyroid glands are removed by mistake or accidentally damaged during a thyroidectomy, the patient may suffer from hypoparathyroidism, a condition in which the levels of parathyroid hormone (a hormone that helps regulate calcium in the body) are abnormally low.
- wound infection