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TripKinetics
How to travel, fly, and keep moving safely while your body is still healing from surgery or injury.
Recovery on the move: flying, walking, and healing after an operation.

Clots and staying safe

Departure Lounge · 1 thread

DVT worries, compression stockings, hydration, and keeping moving on a long flight while you heal.

The fear that brings most people to this section is a blood clot, and it is a reasonable one: a recent operation and a long flight both raise the risk, and together they raise it more. What the threads here do is turn that fear into a short list of things that actually help, told by people who have done the flight and by the odd former nurse who wandered in. It is the section Dr Boyd watches most closely, because the line between a sensible habit and a medical decision matters here.

The habits that come up in every clot thread

The same practical list forms across these threads: move and walk regularly, do calf exercises in the seat, keep drinking water, and wear graduated compression stockings if you have been advised to. The people who felt calmest on the flight were the ones who had a plan for the hours in the seat rather than sitting still and worrying.

What the stockings do and do not do is laid out in compression stockings for flying, and the fuller picture of who is most at risk and what the numbers really are is in blood clots on flights after surgery. Anything involving blood-thinning medication is a decision for your own clinician, never for a forum, and the threads here are careful to keep it that way.

If you are worried about your own flight, post the operation you had and how long the flight is, and people will tell you what worked for them in the same spot.