How to care for patients with tongue cancer before surgery

For cancer, more and more patients choose to undergo surgery to have a healthy body. Tongue cancer is no exception, and surgery is the most important method of treating tongue cancer. Before surgery, patients want to adjust their bodies to be suitable for surgery, but they don’t know how to do it. Now let’s learn about how to care for tongue cancer patients before surgery.

1. Giving patients a good diet before surgery so that they have a good physique to ensure the smooth progress of the surgery is a necessary condition for promoting the patient's recovery. Therefore, patients should take some specific measures to increase nutrition in the period before surgery. For example, thinner patients should be given a high-calorie, high-protein, and high-vitamin diet so that they can gain weight in a short period of time; obese patients should be given a high-protein, low-fat diet to store some protein and consume body fat, because excessive body fat will affect wound healing.

2. Psychological care. In addition to facing life threats, tongue cancer patients will also lose their normal appearance and some important physiological functions, such as the ability to eat and speak normally. They are under greater psychological pressure than patients with general malignant tumors. Therefore, nursing staff should create a good atmosphere for communication and confession for patients, encourage patients to express their feelings, show understanding for patients' fears, teach patients relaxation techniques and methods of diverting attention, and reasonably explain the questions raised by patients and their families.

3. Respiratory care: When the patient is admitted to the hospital, find out whether he has a history of smoking. If so, explain to the patient the harm of smoking and its impact on postoperative recovery, and ask the patient to quit smoking one week before surgery; pay attention to rest and keep warm to prevent colds. If there is a respiratory infection, appropriate antibiotics should be used to control the respiratory infection before surgery.

4. The patient should fast for 12 hours before the operation and abstain from water for 46 hours before the operation to prevent vomiting or aspiration pneumonia during anesthesia or surgery. Excessive food accumulation in the gastrointestinal tract will also affect the smooth progress of the operation.

The above are some nursing measures for preoperative care of tongue cancer. I hope they will be helpful to you.