Dr Donaldson – Pre-Operative Instructions

Please consider the following information prior to your surgery:

• You should not eat or drink anything including water, for 6 hours before your surgery.
• If you are Diabetic or take blood-thinning medications please tell your surgeon. Do not take diabetic medications (Tablets or insulin) on the day of surgery.  If you take diabetic medications while fasting, your blood sugars can go too low
• Continue to monitor your sugars on the morning of your surgery to ensure you do not go too high or too low. The nurses at the hospital will be able to assist you with this also
• If you are on heart or blood pressure medications, please take them as usual before the surgery with a sip of water. Please bring with you a list of your current medications for the anaesthetist.
• If you are on blood thinning medications (Aspirin, warfarin, Plavix, xaralto etc) please discuss this with your doctor pre-operatively. There are slightly increased risks of bleeding while on these medications, but in general the risks of stopping them (eg heart attack, stroke) are far worse, so in the vast majority of cases, these medications do NOT need to be stopped prior to retinal surgery. It is extremely important if you have prosthetic heart valves or prior cardiac events, that you do NOT stop your medications without discussing this with your cardiologist or GP first and in most cases we can perform the retinal surgery without stopping them. If you are on warfarin, then ideally your INR should be measured a few days prior to surgery and should be 2.5 or less.

If you have any questions about your surgery, please call at any time to discuss with our staff