Incision Decisions: A Guide to Getting Through Surgery, Recovery, and Your Hospital Stay

Incision Decisions by Kaye Newton is just a little over 200 pages, but don’t let the size fool you. There is more useful information in this small volume than you’d find in many larger self-help books. The purpose of the book is to provide prospective surgery patients a guide to help them navigate through every stage, from pre-surgery to post-surgery and recuperation.

Newton’s advice is supported by excellent resources. She has researched and found reputable sources to help readers educate themselves about hospitals, surgeons, and other medical information that will assist them in making decisions related to their surgery. She cautions against doing a random online search of a specific condition, which can lead to blogs with nightmarish stories that would not be helpful. Rather, she provides solid medical resources such as MedlinePlus, Cleveland Clinic, and Johns Hopkins Health Library and, even then, always urges readers to share what they find in an open dialog with their own physician. This is the kind of common-sense approach that patients need.

She walks the reader through each step, from preparing a personal health record, either hard copy or electronic, to what to expect when being admitted the day of surgery, to ways to get answers to questions while hospitalized, and more.

While her method of tackling these subjects was impressive, I wasn’t entirely surprised until I reached the other chapters of the book that deal with more practical matters that many of us might not think to consider before surgery: things like preparing the home so it will be ready when you return from surgery and can’t do last-minute cleaning or organizing, how to stay positive through recovery, and devising a way to accurately track dosages of post-operative medications. She includes templates for lists and charts for several of these items and suggests useful apps to make it easier to stay organized. She also includes easy recipes that a recovering patient can assemble with a minimum of energy and effort.

Perhaps the best surprise of all was the way Newton used humor to make her point. Surgery is scary, and we take it seriously, but as anyone who has been a surgery patient can attest, there are moments of unexpected humor. Incision Decisions is peppered with plenty of these, which keep the momentum going through the entire book.

Newton’s style of writing lends itself to a conversational tone, but this does not diminish the quality of information she is delivering. She is credible because of her own surgery experiences, her work as an advocate for family members who were hospitalized for surgery, and the careful research she has undertaken for this book.