Get calcium and bring it with you
Before you come for parathyroid surgery at the Norman Parathyroid Center you need to purchase a bottle of calcium pills and bring it with you to the hospital.
One of the most important aspects of successful parathyroid surgery is making sure the patient has a gradual reduction in their calcium level from elevated to normal over a 2-week period of time. Patients often don’t feel good If the decrease in blood calcium from high to normal is too rapid. We have studied this phenomenon extensively on tens of thousands of patients and published our results several times. Our protocol for giving calcium is widely known and used by many institutions as the gold-standard for calcium supplementation.
As discussed in other areas of this app, we start most patients on 5 calcium pills per day for a week, decreasing to 3 per day for a week and then 2 per day for a longer period of time just to help build bones.
You need to purchase a bottle of calcium pills before you come to Tampa, and you need to bring it with you to the hospital because you will start taking the calcium within 30 minutes of the operation. We’ll give you the first calcium pill in the hospital, but you will start taking your own calcium about 2 hours later. You should bring the calcium to the hospital with you so we can answer any questions you have.
We prefer Citracal brand of calcium
We have tried a number of calcium brands, types, and formulations and can tell you that the vast majority of patients do the best on Citracal + D brand, which is available at most grocery stores, pharmacies, Walmart, Target, etc. Get the full strength (maximum) pills. These are pretty big pills but you can break them in half if you need to. If you do get the “petite” size pills, you must remember that it takes 3.2 petite pills to equal 2 maximum pills. We strongly advise you to get the maximum pills for the first few weeks, and then for the long term you can switch to petite size if the maximum size is too hard to swallow.
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