My flight home is booked for day 6 after the op and I've just read about clots. Did anyone actually stay the full ten days?

#1EmmaLouise31(Joined Jan 2026 · 22 posts)August 6, 2026, 10:47 pm

Surgery is in three weeks, overseas, and I booked the return flight back in April because it was cheap. Day 6 home, eleven hours in the air. At the time that felt generous, I'd read people saying they were "fine after a few days".

Tonight I've fallen down a hole about DVT and I feel sick. My package includes a check with the surgeon on day 5 and then I'm on my own. Changing the flight is about two hundred pounds plus a difference in fare, and my leave from work runs out anyway, so realistically I'd be taking unpaid days on top.

Is day 6 genuinely reckless or is this 1am panic? Did people stay longer than the package assumed, and did anything actually go wrong for anyone who flew early?

#2sixweekspost(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)August 7, 2026, 6:58 am

I stayed twelve days and I'm glad I did, but not for the clot reason. On day 8 one side went noticeably firmer and more swollen than the other and I was able to walk into the clinic that afternoon and have the surgeon look at it. It turned out to be nothing that needed doing, but the reassurance was worth every extra night in that grim little hotel.

That's the argument for staying that nobody makes: it's not just about the flight, it's about being where the person who operated on you is, during the week things are most likely to kick off.

#3Natalie88(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)August 7, 2026, 11:35 am

Two hundred quid is annoying. It is also less than the cost of a single night's stay if you end up needing one, and about a tenth of what a private consultation and scan at home costs if you land with a problem and no one wants to touch someone else's surgery.

Ring the clinic tomorrow and ask what date THEY want you to fly, in writing. Then decide. Don't let the ticket make a medical decision for you, that's completely backwards and it's how everyone ends up in this exact 1am hole.

#4Miss Charlotte VaneSurgical moderator(Joined Sep 2024 · 58 posts)August 8, 2026, 9:12 am

To answer the clinical part directly first: the concern about flying soon after any operation is venous thromboembolism, meaning a clot forming in a deep leg vein and, at worst, travelling to the lungs. Surgery makes the blood more inclined to clot for a period afterwards, and sitting still for hours slows the flow through the leg veins. Neither factor on its own is dramatic for most healthy people; it's the combination, close together in time, that we take seriously. Nothing about it involves the implants, and cabin pressure has no effect on them whatsoever, despite what you'll read.

The commonly used window before a long flight home after breast augmentation abroad is roughly 7 to 10 days, which does two jobs at once: it puts distance between the anaesthetic and the flight, and it keeps you near your surgeon through the period when bleeding, infection and other early problems are most likely to declare themselves, exactly as sixweekspost describes. But that range is a default, not your number. It moves with the length of the operation, whether anything was done alongside the augmentation, the length of the flight, and your personal risk: a previous clot, a clotting disorder, combined hormonal contraception or HRT, smoking, and reduced mobility all matter, and some of those change the plan rather than just the date. That's a conversation to have with your operating surgeon before you travel, and if any of those apply to you, raise them at the pre-operative consultation rather than on day 5.

What I'd want you to take from the thread: get the flying date from your surgeon in advance and build the trip around it, keep moving your feet and walk when the crew allow, follow their instructions on stockings or anything else they prescribe, and treat calf pain or swelling, chest pain or breathlessness as urgent rather than something to sit quietly with. The site's guides to flying after breast augmentation and having surgery abroad set out the rest, including the aftercare arrangements at home that people underestimate far more often than the flight.

#5Jade R.(Joined Mar 2025 · 18 posts)August 8, 2026, 7:26 pm

Whatever date you end up flying, book the aisle seat and check every bag. I flew at day 10 feeling smug and still nearly cried trying to get a small rucksack out from under the seat in front, because that's precisely the movement you've been told not to do and there's nowhere to hide from it at row 41.

#6EmmaLouise31(Joined Jan 2026 · 22 posts)August 19, 2026, 1:09 pm

Rang the clinic. They said day 9 minimum for a flight that long and seemed mildly surprised anyone had booked day 6, which was reassuring and infuriating in equal measure given they sold me the package.

Flight moved to day 10, two hundred and thirty quid, two unpaid days. Work were fine about it, which I'd been catastrophising about for no reason. Thank you all, genuinely, this thread saved me from a decision I made in April purely because it was cheap.