After Your Procedure: The Recovery Room, Nausea and Going Home

When your procedure ends, you are taken to a recovery area where your medical care continues under the direction of an anesthesiologist. The ASA's Standards for Postanesthesia Care, first approved in 2004 and last amended in October 2024, require continued evaluation and monitoring until the patient's condition is stable, with the specific endpoint determined by the patient's condition and the setting, and require that recovery arrangements provide for assessment and treatment of pain and for evaluation and management of complications.¹

Where anesthesia is provided in an office, the ASA's statement on office-based anesthesia is explicit that the anesthesiologist should be physically present during the procedure and immediately available until the patient has been discharged from anesthesia care, and that discharge is a physician responsibility documented in the medical record.²

Nausea, sore throat and grogginess

Postoperative nausea and vomiting is a common concern after anesthesia, and it is both measurable and manageable. The Fourth Consensus Guidelines for the management of postoperative nausea and vomiting recommend assessing risk beforehand and combining preventive strategies for adults with one or more risk factors.³ A sore throat after a breathing tube is common; a 2015 Cochrane review found that intravenous lidocaine given before induction reduced its incidence, although the evidence was of low quality.⁴

Before you go home you should know whom to call with a concern, which symptoms require urgent attention, and what activity restrictions apply and for how long. Recovery guidance is individual, and your anesthesia provider's written discharge instructions take precedence over a general rule. Ask for those instructions in writing.

Sources

1. American Society of Anesthesiologists. Standards for Postanesthesia Care. Original approval October 27, 2004; last amended October 23, 2024.
2. American Society of Anesthesiologists. Statement on Office-Based Anesthesia. Original approval October 13, 1999; last amended October 23, 2024.
3. Gan TJ, Belani KG, Bergese S, et al. Fourth consensus guidelines for the management of postoperative nausea and vomiting. Anesth Analg. 2020;131(2):411–448.
4. Tanaka Y, Nakayama T, Nishimori M, Tsujimura Y, Kawaguchi M, Sato Y. Lidocaine for preventing postoperative sore throat. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2015;2015(7):CD004081.