Unfortunately, if you wake up from surgery with any side-effects, you are on your own. There is nothing more your surgeon can do. He has done his job; he was there to cut the sympathetic nerve and that's it. He cannot go back and undo the work he has just done. This is permanent. This is your new life!

You will have a follow-up appointment after a few weeks to remove the stitches, and you will have the opportunity to discuss any side-effects with your surgeon. But this is really for his benefit, not yours. This is so he can get feedback from you to see if his latest 'tweak' provided a better result than the 'tweak' he did on the patient before you.

It is pretty much a guarantee that you'll have compensatory sweating, as nearly all patients do to varying degrees, and the most common response is 'it will settle down over time and may eventually even disappear altogether'. But this is not true. Your compensatory sweating does not go away, nor do any of the other side-effects.

Another complaint you will often hear from ETS patients is about surgeons who eventually stop taking their calls and cut off all communication with them, especially when their side-effects are particularly bad. And this happens way more often than you think. Some even want to charge you more money every time you want to see them, even though they were the ones that butchered you in the first place.

You then have no choice but to seek medical help from other specialists (or several), and what you will then find really surprising is no other doctors have a clue what ETS surgery is. Most of them have never even heard of it. But occasionally you do find one that read about it at medical school but you will be the first person they have come across who has actually undergone the procedure.

The biggest kick in the guts for me was when I went back to see my surgeon after a couple of months after my fateful day. I was sweating profusely from the neck down, I had pain in both my arms, and I was having extreme difficulty passing urine, plus there were several other side-effects.

To my absolute bewilderment, my surgeon sat there and denied my side-effects were caused by the surgery. He didn't ask questions or even try to clarify anything I was telling him. His reply was always 'That doesn't happen from the surgery' or 'That's not a side-effect of the surgery'. The only way doctors can build a database of side-effects is via feedback from patients, so I have absolutely no idea why he wasn't interested in the outcome of my surgery.

And that's usually about the time when the anxiety starts, throw in some depression, and we now have the onset of a whole bunch of mental health issues.