Day four after keyhole surgery and I have a weird pain in my SHOULDER, nowhere near the cuts. When does the gas pain stop and what recovery is normal?

Ok so I had my gallbladder out by keyhole on Friday and I was braced for sore cuts and a rough tummy, which I have, fine, expected. What NOBODY warned me about is this pain up in my right shoulder and sort of the tip of it, which makes no sense because they operated on my abdomen. It's worst when I lie down and it aches into my neck. I actually rang the ward slightly panicking that something had gone wrong somewhere else entirely.

They said gas. Which, ok, but how does gas from my belly end up in my shoulder, and more to the point when does it GO because it's driving me up the wall. I'm also incredibly bloated and windy which is grim, and I keep second guessing whether I'm recovering normally or being a wimp. Threw in the other two questions everyone's going to ask me this week while I'm here: when do people actually go back to work, and when can I drive again, because my manager and my mother are both asking and I don't have a clue.

The shoulder thing floored me too, it's such a bizarre place to hurt after a stomach op. Mine was at its worst around day three and pretty much gone by the end of the first week. What actually helped was getting up and walking little laps of the house rather than lying still, and peppermint tea for the trapped wind, which sounds like something your nan would say but genuinely moved things along. I'm the impatient exercise type and I was gentle-walking within days and back to easy runs by about the six week mark once the cuts had fully knitted.

Walk, walk, walk. Boring answer but the gas shifts far quicker when you're upright and moving than lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself. Mine went by about day five. You're not being a wimp, that shoulder pain is a proper thing.

Let me answer the shoulder question head on, because it frightens people every time and it is entirely expected. It is called referred shoulder-tip pain. During keyhole surgery the abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide gas to give the surgeon room to work, and a little of that gas lingers afterwards and irritates the underside of the diaphragm. The diaphragm and the skin over your shoulder tip happen to share a nerve supply, so the brain reads the irritation as coming from the shoulder. Nothing is wrong with your shoulder at all. It typically settles within a few days to a week as the gas is absorbed, and gentle walking genuinely speeds that up, exactly as described above.

On the rest of the normal timeline, so you can measure yourself against something real. After keyhole surgery most people go home the same day or the next and are back to normal activities and work in roughly 1 to 2 weeks, though a physically heavy job may want the longer end. Driving usually resumes around a week after keyhole surgery, but the test is functional rather than a fixed date: you should be off strong painkillers and able to perform an emergency stop without hesitating or flinching, and it is worth a quick check with your car insurer too. Bloating and wind in the first several days is ordinary and eases. The site's week-by-week recovery guide lays the whole arc out. The one thing I will not let get lost in the reassurance is the list of things that are not part of normal recovery and mean a same-day call rather than a forum post: a fever, a wound that is turning red and weeping, yellowing of the skin or eyes, or pain that is climbing rather than fading. Those are covered in the risks and complications guide. Your own surgeon or GP, who can examine you, is the right person for anything that feels like one of those, not us.

Mine was gone by day five and I remember thinking exactly the same, what has my shoulder got to do with anything. You're bang on the normal track. Keep moving and don't lie flat feeling martyred, that's when it grips worst.

Reporting back a week and a half on. The shoulder pain lifted around day six almost overnight, just like everyone said, and the bloating went with it. I'm back at my desk job this week taking it steady, and I did a cautious little drive to the shops yesterday once I was sure I could stamp on the brake without wincing. Reading that it was gas fooling my nerves rather than something torn made the whole thing so much less scary. Thank you, this thread basically talked me down.