Taking care of your lungs after surgery is an important part of the success of your surgery. It is important that your lungs are working at their best following surgery to ensure that you get plenty of oxygen to the tissues of the body that are trying to heal. Lungs that are not exercised properly can lead to poor blood oxygen levels and even develop pneumonia (an infection in the lungs) after surgery.
 

There are several reasons that your lungs may not work normally after surgery. If you were put to sleep with a general anesthetic for your surgery, the medications used for the anesthesia may temporarily cause the lungs not to function quite as well as normal. This is one reason that a spinal-type anesthetic is recommended whenever possible. Lying in bed prevents completely normal function of the lungs and the medications you take for pain may cause you not to breathe as deep as you normally would.
 

You can think of the lung like a large sponge. All the small air pockets where the blood receives oxygen are like the small holes in a sponge. If the small holes collapse, or squeeze together, no air can get into the holes to supply oxygen to the blood. When we breathe deeply, the lungs expand and all the individual holes of the sponge fill with air. Coughing does the same thing because we increase the pressure of the air coming into the holes of the sponge. Lungs that have collapsed areas not only don't move oxygen into the blood, they cannot remove the fluids and mucous produced normally by the lungs. This can create an area that is ripe for developing a place where bacteria can grow and produce a lung infection, or pneumonia.
 

After surgery, there are several things you will need to do to keep your lungs working optimally. Your nurse will encourage you to take frequent deep breaths and cough frequently, and will be there to coach you. Getting out of bed, even upright in a chair, allows the lungs to work much better, so as soon as possible, you will be allowed to get into a chair. The respiratory therapist has several tools to help maintain optimal lung function. The incentive spirometer is a small device that measures how hard you are breathing and gives you a tool to help improve your deep breathing. If you have any other lung disease, such as asthma, the respiratory therapist may also use medications that are given through breathing treatments to help open the air pockets in the lungs.