Kids and Plastic Surgery

Practical tips to help you and your child

If your child is going to have surgery, it’s a good idea to explain to
them, repeatedly and in detail, what to expect when they go to hospital.


Things they might want to know include:

• Doctors and nurses in the operating room fix up lots and lots of kids
 all the time. That’s their job that they do all day.
• The doctors and nurses all wear funny clothes like pyjamas and funny
hats on their heads
• The doctors and nurses love to ask lots of questions…everyone wants to
ask mum what they are there to get fixed and what their kid’s name is, lots
of times.
• When you have surgery the sleep doc, who is called an anaesthetist, puts
 you to sleep with a special medicine. Sometimes you get to breathe on a
special spaceman mask, same as an astronaut.
• The sleep doc keeps you asleep until you are all fixed, and then they
give you more medicine to wake you up. Also useful for parents of
teenagers.
• When you wake up and you’re all fixed up, you won’t remember where you
are…older kids will know this feeling when they wake up in grandmas
house/ on a sleepover and they can’t recognise where they are for a few
seconds until they remember they did not go to bed in their own bed the
night before.

Kids don’t naturally harbour a fear of hospitals – they learn it from their parents.

 

Kids get upset about surgery, because their parents get upset…they don’t
know to know that surgery and hospital should be a scary or stressful
experience apart from learning that from others…calm parents have
calm(er) kids.

This opinion piece was brought to you by Dr Mark Baldwin.

For more information or to answer any questions please feel free to call 03 85602999 or email enquiries@horizonplasticsurgery.com