Surgery for sleep apnea can be a very scary thing to consider and you should be well aware of what it involves before making a commitment to go through with it. While the actual surgery itself is relatively easy for doctors to perform, there are many risks to be aware of after you leave the operating room. For example, a turbinectomy is a surgery that is frequently performed. This is where a surgeon will remove or reduce the size of a nasal turbinate, or straighten the nasal septum. This cuts down on the nasal obstruction or congestion and relieves airway pressure. Other common surgeries for sleep apnea include tonsilectomies and/or adeoidectomies, which increase the size of the airway, reducing the oxygen deprivation.
Regardless of the surgery for sleep apnea that you undergo, there can be problems with the drugs used during and after surgery. These drugs work to relieve the pain by depressing consciousness, effects that can stay with the body for hours, if not days, after the surgery has ended. Even in low doses, individuals recovering from surgery to overcome sleep apnea can die from the drugs in their system. Scarier still, it’s not just the drugs that can cause life threatening irregularities in breathing. In fact, even if you have no drugs in your system at all, you may still be at risk.
This is because surgery patients for sleep apnea, as is the case with all surgeries, tend to experience swelling. This swelling of the throat, mouth and nasal passages can negate the surgery, even if only in the short term. Since this is the case, individuals recovering from surgery for sleep apnea should be intensively monitored. There may not be anything more uncomfortable than recovering from a fairly major surgery without the aid of prescription pain killers, but doing so may be the only way to ensure breathing at night.