Five questions to ask before your dad's surgery

When you are reading this

The surgery is on the calendar. The hospital sent paperwork. Your dad signed where they told him to sign. You read it twice and still are not sure what is in it.

This is the conversation worth having before the morning of.

What surgical consent does and does not cover

The consent form lists named risks: bleeding, infection, anesthesia complications, the things that have happened often enough to require disclosure. It does not always describe what the recovery will look like, what counts as a successful outcome in your dad’s case specifically, or what happens if something goes wrong on the table.

Those are the conversations worth having before he is in the gown.

Five questions worth taking with you

[Full guide coming. The questions worth taking to the pre-op visit, the surgeon’s last call, or the anesthesiologist’s brief appearance:]

• What is the success rate for this procedure in patients my dad’s age and condition, not the average across all patients?
• What does the first 24 hours after surgery look like, and where will he be?
• What is the plan for post-operative pain, and how does that interact with the medications he already takes?
• What is the risk of postoperative delirium, and what is the team’s plan to monitor for it?
• If something goes wrong, who decides what happens next, and how do we reach them?

Where I come in

When you describe your dad’s situation, I will pull the recent literature on this procedure in older adults, surface the questions specific to his other conditions, and cite each one. The conversation goes differently when you walk in already knowing what you want to learn.