Diet taboos after anal fistula surgery

The first is all alcoholic drinks, the second is heavy and stimulating foods with a lot of chili peppers, peppers, and mustard, and the third is cold and cold foods that can easily induce acute diarrhea, such as ice drinks and ice fruits just taken out of the refrigerator. The remaining controversial taboos can actually be flexibly adjusted according to your own physical constitution and recovery stage.

Don't think I'm being alarmist. I met a 23-year-old young man during my rotation in the anorectal department. He had a simple low-level anal fistula. The operation went very smoothly. The director said he would be able to go back to work normally after a week of recovery. As a result, on the third day he couldn't help but go to eat butter hot pot with cold beer with his friends. That night he was rolling in pain and went to the emergency room. The perianal wound was swollen like a plump peach, and the unabsorbed capsaicin stained the fresh wound. When changing the dressing, he pinched the stainless steel handrail of the nurse's station and deformed it. The wound should have healed in a week, but it took more than 20 years for the swelling to subside. It was purely an unnecessary sin. After all, the wound of anal fistula is open, and the passage of feces will naturally cause irritation. If you add a little "chemical attack", the pain will be so painful that you doubt whether life is really an exaggeration.

Speaking of which, there is another common misunderstanding. Many people are so frightened just after surgery that they eat plain porridge with pickles, saying that they are afraid that eating miscellaneous food will cause pain when defecating, which will actually slow down the recovery process. A 60-year-old aunt I took care of before listened to her neighbor's "experience" and only drank thin white porridge for three days after the operation. On the fourth day, she wanted to defecate, and it was like a sheep dung egg. She was stuck in the anus for half an hour, tearing the newly grown granules, and bleeding a lot. In fact, she suffered for a week longer than the patients who had eaten normally. The nutrition of white porridge is simply not enough to meet the needs of long wounds, the high-quality protein cannot keep up, and the wound healing speed is at least one third slower. There is really no need to be so harsh on yourself.

As for the most frequently asked question, whether "fawu" can be eaten, in fact, there is really no unified answer in the industry. The view of Western medicine is that as long as you are not allergic to beef, mutton, seafood, and eggs, you can eat them after surgery, and you are even encouraged to eat more, especially steamed fish and boiled lean beef, which have high protein content and are not greasy. After eating, the wound will grow faster and the probability of infection will be reduced. However, many experienced experts in the Department of Anorectal Medicine of Traditional Chinese Medicine do recommend that you eat as little "hairy food" as possible in the first 7 days after surgery, such as beef, mutton, and seafood. After all, some people will experience increased perianal secretions and wound edema after eating. If you are prone to allergies or have diarrhea easily after eating seafood, then there is nothing wrong with tolerating it for the first week. It is not too late to eat after a thin layer of granulation has grown on the wound surface.

In addition to these, there are some small details that you can pay attention to: particularly hard nuts, brittle bones, as well as glutinous rice dumplings, rice cakes and other indigestible foods. Try to eat as little as possible in the first three days after surgery. If digestion is not complete and hard residue rubs onto the wound surface, it will cause you to feel a jolt of pain. There are also milk teas, cream cakes with a lot of sugar added, as well as fried skewers, fatty meats and other high-fat and high-sugar foods. Try to eat them as little as possible. Eating too much will cause constipation or diarrhea, which will cause discomfort to the wound.

The old director I talked to before also said that you don’t need to be too obsessed with the recipes on the Internet. After eating something, just observe the bowel movement the next day. If the bowel movement is smooth and there is no extra tingling sensation, then eat it. For example, some people usually like to eat slightly spicy food, but they have no reaction even if they eat home-cooked food with some chili peppers two weeks after the operation. Then they don’t need to completely avoid the food. Instead, they are afraid of this and that every day, and they are prone to constipation due to emotional stress.

All in all, there are two core logics for post-operative diet: one is not to cause trouble to the gastrointestinal tract, and try to keep bowel movements in a soft and yellow banana state; the other is not to lose nutrition and leave enough "ammunition" for wound healing, and don't make yourself sallow and thin because of the so-called taboos, which will slow down your recovery. You really don’t need to check the list of taboos on the Internet one by one. Paying more attention to your body’s reactions is better than anything else.