Precautions and dietary taboos after abortion

Rest in bed for the first 3 days. Avoid heavy physical labor and contact with ice water for 2 weeks. Sexual life and bathing in the bath are strictly prohibited for 1 month.； One week before the meal, avoid blood-activating ingredients, cold and spicy foods, and alcohol, and give priority to supplementing with high-quality protein and iron.

Last week, when I was working the night shift at the gynecology clinic, I met a 22-year-old girl. The day after the surgery, she went shopping with her friends for an afternoon and drank two large cups of iced milk tea. She had a stomachache in the middle of the night and broke out in a cold sweat. When she came in, her pants were covered in blood, and the amount of bleeding was twice as much as usual during menstruation. The B-ultrasound showed that the uterine cavity was bleeding because she was tired and cold, and she spent hundreds of dollars to stop the bleeding. She suffered for nothing. There are a lot of popular science on the Internet in Europe and the United States saying that abortion is a minor surgery, and you can go to work normally the same day after the operation. This actually depends on the situation: if you are in good physical condition, exercise regularly, have almost no bleeding and no abdominal pain after the operation, then go downstairs and take a walk for 10 minutes every day. Breathing is absolutely fine, but domestic clinical practice generally recommends lying down as much as possible in the first three days. After all, there are wounds in the uterus just after cleaning, and it is easy to fall if you stand for a long time, and the recovery speed will be much slower. If you are usually weak and afraid of the cold, don't be brave and follow the example of foreigners. There is no harm in lying down for two more days.

In addition to not running around and getting tired, there are really many old misunderstandings about personal hygiene. I have seen many girls being held down by their elders for a week after surgery and not being allowed to wash or bathe their hair. In the end, their hair was so oily that they could even cook vegetables, which caused inflammation of the vulva. In fact, as long as you are not taking a bath, a bath, or a hot spring, it is absolutely fine to take a shower with lukewarm water. Adjust the water temperature to about 40 degrees, wash for 10 minutes, and get out quickly. Blow dry your hair with hot air to avoid getting cold. It will be much cleaner than covering it all the time. You also need to change sanitary napkins frequently, changing one every two to three hours at most. Don’t be too troublesome. Bacteria can easily escape into the uterine cavity if they are stuffy for a long time.

The thing that should sound the alarm the most is the matter of having sex. Don’t take any chances. There was a patient who had sex just 12 days after the operation. As a result, she developed acute pelvic inflammatory disease and had a fever of over 39 degrees. Later, after the inflammation subsided, she was found to have a blocked fallopian tube. After trying to get pregnant for two years, she failed to get pregnant. She cried every time she came for a follow-up check-up. And don’t believe the nonsense that “you won’t ovulate before your first menstrual period after surgery”. The ovaries may resume ovulation about 2 weeks after surgery. If no measures are taken, you may get pregnant again just a month after menstruation. The damage to the uterus is really irreversible. If you don’t plan to have children in a short time, it is much more reliable to ask the doctor to wear an IUD or take short-acting contraceptive pills directly after the surgery than to take emergency contraceptive pills afterwards.

After talking about the daily pitfalls to avoid, let’s talk about food. The first reaction of many people after surgery is to stew a pot of donkey-hide gelatin, red dates and longan soup for a tonic. In fact, this is just a mistake. The wound in the uterine cavity has not yet healed in the week before the operation, so you must not touch the blood-activating ingredients such as donkey-hide gelatin, safflower, longan, and rice wine. I have seen many people whose bleeding that had almost stopped increased after drinking it, and it took on and off for half a month to clear up.

You have to tolerate cold things for at least two weeks. Forget about iced milk tea, iced watermelon, and sashimi. Girls who usually suffer from body cold and dysmenorrhea should endure it until their first menstrual period is over. There is no need to completely avoid spicy food. If you are from Sichuan, Chongqing, and Hunan, where you eat spicy food all the time and can't eat spicy food at all, then it's okay to add a little less to satisfy your appetite, but don't eat too spicy food, otherwise it will easily stimulate pelvic congestion and aggravate bleeding. Alcohol is absolutely not allowed, including alcoholic liqueurs and fruit beers, as it will affect blood coagulation and slow down recovery.

As for what you need to eat more, you don’t need to buy those health care products that cost thousands of dollars. A cup of warm milk and two eggs every day, some lean meat soup or black chicken soup at noon, some spinach and pork liver to supplement iron, and some room-temperature strawberries, apples or steamed oranges in the afternoon are more effective than anything else. As for the older generation who often say that you should drink more brown sugar and ginger water, in fact, Western medicine believes that brown sugar has no additional nutrients except sucrose. If you feel warm and comfortable in your stomach after drinking it, then drink it. If you have high blood sugar, don’t drink it. Don’t force yourself to drink it.

In fact, after all, there are not so many complicated rules for recovery after abortion. It is just like having a big cut on your hand. Avoid touching irritating things, don't mess with it, and it will heal slowly. Don't be too anxious, thinking that there will be serious side effects after an operation. As long as you follow the doctor's instructions and take good care of yourself, most people can recover very well. If the bleeding persists for more than 10 days after surgery, or if you have severe stomach pain, fever, or secretions with a peculiar smell, don’t hold on and don’t frighten yourself by searching Baidu. It’s better to go to the hospital for a review as soon as possible.