How long does it take to recover from thyroid cancer surgery

After thyroid cancer surgery, most patients need more than 3 months to recover completely. Since most of the thyroid cancers are papillary or follicular cancers, radical thyroid cancer surgery with postoperative chemotherapy and radiotherapy can be cured, and the surgical method mainly adopts total resection of the affected side of the thyroid gland plus isthmus resection, subtotal resection of the contralateral side, or even total resection of the thyroid gland, so the healing time of the local wounds of the surgery is usually in about one week. However, since the scope of thyroid gland removal is relatively large, there is bound to be thyroxine insufficiency after the operation, so after radical thyroid cancer surgery, it is usually necessary to take thyroxine for life to maintain the body’s thyroxine level, so as not to cause hypothyroidism symptoms. It usually takes 2-3 months for the body to adapt to oral thyroxine and maintain a stable level of thyroxine, so it usually takes more than 3 months for the body to return to normal after thyroid cancer surgery.