What's recovery after distal pancreatectomy and splenectomy like?

Hi Frygirl777,
I'm glad you are a 100% after your Surgery. I was recently diagnosed, and surgery is recommended as part of my forthcoming treatment, but Chemo is recommended first for shrinkage. I'm having anxiety.

I had a distal pancreatectomy with splenectomy on Jan 5, 2023. You have to take it easy the first 6-8 weeks meaning no lifting & eat a low fat with small meals. Drink lots of water. Get lots of rest. Low intensity exercise like walking helps the healing process. I had no complications other than middle back pain that started about a month after. Surgeon said it was likely my nerves and inflammation. I started wearing Lifewave X39 & Aeon stem cell activation patches on the area & pain totally diminished within about a week. I have been wearing them ever since & there has been no recurrence of the pain at all. They speed wound healing also. I’m 100% now. No blood sugar issues however I eat no sugar due to cancer growing & thriving from sugar.

I had a distal pancreatectomy with splenectomy on Jan 5, 2023. You have to take it easy the first 6-8 weeks meaning no lifting & eat a low fat with small meals. Drink lots of water. Get lots of rest. Low intensity exercise like walking helps the healing process. I had no complications other than middle back pain that started about a month after. Surgeon said it was likely my nerves and inflammation. I started wearing Lifewave X39 & Aeon stem cell activation patches on the area & pain totally diminished within about a week. I have been wearing them ever since & there has been no recurrence of the pain at all. They speed wound healing also. I’m 100% now. No blood sugar issues however I eat no sugar due to cancer growing & thriving from sugar.

I will keep your experience in mind if I wind up being told that my tumor shrunk enough to have surgery. Better to hear about the possible complications than be blind sighted by them. Thanks for sharing your story.

Hello @kim1965,

I appreciate the update on your wife's post-surgery recovery. It is good to know that she is seeing improvement. You are so right to advise @milagro45pr to eat small meals and/or "grazing" as you said after surgery. It takes a while for the digestive tract to heal and normalize itself after extensive surgery.

Were there any types of foods (or liquids) that were especially helpful when your wife began to eat?

@milagro45pr
My wife @kim1965, had same surgery March 1, and some of the same complications with pain. Our day 2 was good though, but day 3 was bad with difficulties breathing. They found a blood clot in both lungs, from the surgery and started blood thinners. Hang in there, her situation improved to where they sent her home on day 5, only to be brought back to the hospital 2 days later for 2 more days. She is now almost 3 weeks out from surgery and is doing better eating, trying to walk every day(maybe 20 minutes), but let your body rest when you get home. The eating will be slow to progress, more like grazing, as very difficult to eat a full meal, but it gets better. We hope she will improve quicker now with the walking per surgeon suggestions. I wish you all the same, and if there is any questions we can help with please let us know, and we will try to share what we can that worked for us.

I had a open distal pancreatectomy with splenectomy on March 10. First day after surgery was pretty brutal . They were pumping me with tramadol gabapentin, fentanyl, Thea and epidural, but the pain was still there, and I was so sick to my stomach that I couldn’t barely get up without feeling that I was gonna fall flat on my face. They two anesthesiologist came by and I told them to replace my Fentanyl with some thing else because it was making me to sick to be able to get up. They remove the fentanyl and replace it with numbing medication. My my surgeon asked me if I wanted to try Toradol for the pain because I was so sensitive to all narcotics. At the moment I asked her to remove the gabapentin and tramadol since it wasn’t working. Just with the numbing medication and the toradol was enough to control my pain. Foley was removed on the second day, and I was advanced to ice chips, which I wasn’t very happy because I was so thirsty I would have thought I would have I have been through the desert for 10 days without having a sip of water Day three of us moving better less pain. On day three I started having some chills and I told the nurse to take my temperature when she did invite a low-grade fever of 99.9 they immediately got an order for an x-ray of my chest and it showed that I had a pneumonia that had developed overnight, they immediately got orders to put me on three different antibiotics while they try to figure out what ham type of pneumonia or if I had other infection in the body that they did not know about.my white blood cell count was really high and my red blood cell count was really low . This routine continue for the next four days. I had blood from every day and x-ray done every day to check. The pneumonia was improving and my blood counts were improving. On the six my surgeon decided to get a consult from a pulmonologist to see if it was OK to get aspiration of the fluid in my lungs to see if it was infected. When it was finally scheduled, and then ultrasound was done to see how much liquid they noticed that it was beginning to be reabsorbed in my body and it was not worth it take any risk of inserting a needle into my lung space and puncturing a lung , and they said that it was better to just watch it and let it resolve on Its own. And on the morning before I was his charge, an x-ray was performed with my chest and it showed that the fluid in my lung was almost reabsorbed into my body. Results of the masses removed were like clean clean margins around him low grade one tumor contained within its base. No further treatment will be needed.