Recovery and after
Patient voices · 1 thread
The short hospital stay, the groin bruise, and the honest week by week that follows.
For a lot of us the surprise of TAVR is how ordinary the recovery feels: home in a day or two, a bruise on the thigh, and the breathlessness simply gone. Every heart is different, though, so this is where people trade the real week by week rather than the leaflet version.
5 replies · last reply by frankm1952, Jul 14, 2026
The honest first fortnight
The part that caught me out was that the limiting factor early on was not my heart at all, it was the small puncture in my groin. The breathlessness lifted almost at once, which made it very tempting to overdo things in the first fortnight.
If you want the week by week, what recovery actually looks like walks from discharge through to the follow-up scan. And because nobody is served by a rosy account, the risks and complications worth knowing sets out what can go wrong and how often, without either scaremongering or glossing over it.
Compare notes freely, but remember that your medication, your activity limits and your follow-up dates are set by your own team for reasons specific to you.