1) Sleeping on his side or climbing stairs or raising his BP will
not make one "bleed to death". That is an EXTREME one in a million possibility. But when you do sleep on ur side, or worst your chest, you are promoting collection of blood/fluids at the site of injury. The squeezing of the blood vessels encourages seeping-out of fluids from the bloodstream. Once again that DOES NOT mean you will "bleed to death". Depending on the severity of the cracks/fissures in the blood vessels, anything could leak out. Worst case scenario you will have blood, full of red blood cells, oozing out, which is essentially a haematoma. Sometimes the crack is wide just enough for the plasma in the blood to seep out, which leads to a seroma. Plasma looks quite the same as pale yellow colored clear liquid that you might have often noticed oozing out of skin incisions. When out of the blood stream it solidifies into a crusty yellow solid.
2) Coming back to the internal bleeding question. A few milliliters/drops of blood that seeped out at the site of injury wont kill anyone or pose any serious threat to the person's overall health (one might not even feel it) , but is enough to cause visibly conspicuous inflammation. Seeping is not the same as a full blown-out rupture. Even if a blood vessel DOES rupture, unless the person is heamophilic, the body is completely capable of safely dealing with it by coagulating the blood at the site of the injury with the help of platelets. So once again there is no serious threat to the person's well being. None the less, the blood that did manage to spill over just sits there leading to inflammation, bruising etc, and takes a long time to disappear/drain out. The veins are superb at draining out fluids from sites that are supposed to be supplied by the circulatory system; anything extraneous to that, and the body does a pathetic job of draining out the fluids, and this throttles the healing to a great extent. This is the reason, why post-op some doctors attach drains to the patient, if they feel that there might be bleeding/excessive fluid secretion post-surgery in that particular patient's case. In the absence of drains, sometimes when there is enough fluid collection (fluid can be anything blood, plasma, water etc) the doctor might elect to drain it out using syringes. But then again, if the doc feels that the fluid collection is not to the extent that it will severely impair the healing process, he will tell the patient not to worry about it, and "give it time" - not always what the patient wants to hear
3) Sleeping in the wrong position will most probably not lead to "significant" bleeding, but it can definitely exacerbate an existing condition leading to sub-optimal healing. You are letting mother gravity happily do what you have been so carefully trying to avoid by keeping your heart-rate low or not working out. Not saying that sleeping in the wrong position leads to the same kind of damage as working out too soon, but both of them will lead down the same path of sub-optimal healing and un-necessary complications that could have been completely avoided. Sleeping on your back after a gynecomastia surgery is highly recommended by most of the top surgeons because it does optimize the healing process. In fact, I noticed a post on this forum about a guy who couldnt sleep on his back due to a sleep apnea condition, and doctor Jacobs strongly advised him against the surgery.
4) Pain should not always be used as the only determining factor in deciding whether what you are doing is ok or not. Different people have different tolerance and sensitivity for pain. Many people would agree with this, that immediately after the operation, the feeling in your chest is that of a very hard chest workout - definitely not what you would expect after a surgery where your were cut open, tubes were dug into and tissue was extracted. Different people would perceive this feeling in a variety of ways. While some would call it mere "soreness" and go about their routine daily activities simply ignoring the unpleasant feeling, others would actually comprehend it as serious "pain" and not do anything that elicits that feelings. In fact bodybuilders, crave this feeling of soreness because they use it as a yardstick for the efficacy of their workout, which gives them greater motivation to go hammer and tongs at the next chest workout and make their muscles bigger. Thankfully, a post-op gynecomastia patient knows that the soreness is not due to an anabolism-inducing muscle breakdown which he should "man" up to, but due to trauma caused by surgical instruments being poked into him. That is why it is always more prudent to
go by what your doctor says because ONLY HE knows whats actually going on inside your body.
Dont just go by what your body tells you. Unfortunately we are not that good at interpreting the signals given off by our bodies.
5) Different people heal at different rates. One week is too premature to say that you are out of the dangerous complication-prone zone. People develop fluid collection complications even when they are all the way into the 4th 5th week of recovery.
6) Kingboobs I apologize if I came off rude in my earlier response, that was not my intent.
Lastly, but most importantly, best of luck on your visit to Dr Masood, wantridofgyno17. For all you know, it could be nothing and all this worrying could be for naught.
Alrite.....enough with the right and wrong sleeping positions, hijacking wantrid's thread,
.....I just cant wait to heal completely so that I can do some actual "sleeping"