Weird symptoms after parathyroid surgery
Sometimes a patient will call and say “my fingers and my face feel weird, but it doesn’t seem exactly like what I read about the symptoms of low calcium. Is this low calcium?” Symptoms of low calcium can be tricky, and don’t always fit the textbook descriptions. While the most common sensation is described as numbness or tingling in the finger tips or lips, other sensations such as vibrating, trembling, and just an odd feeling of the skin can also occur.
Never on the day of surgery
Symptoms of low calcium usually start around on the third day after the parathyroid operation, and usually involve the fingers and the face first. If it is 3 days after your operation, and you have a new numbness-like sensation in your hands, you can assume it is due to low calcium, and that you need to take more. Start with 2 extra Citracal.
Only one in 20 of our patients get any symptoms of low calcium, and it only lasts a day or two in almost all cases. Note that the symptoms of low calcium usually start three days after parathyroid surgery. It never occurs the day of surgery or the next day. It is very uncommon on the second day, and if you are one of the rare patients to gets low calcium symptoms after parathyroid surgery at the Norman Parathyroid Center, it almost always starts on day 3. It is extremely rare for these symptoms to start 2 weeks or more after surgery. So if you had surgery a few weeks or a month ago and now notice some new numbness in your fingers, it is probably NOT low calcium.