HS Surgery Planner
Has a deroofing, excision or other HS procedure been proposed? Clarify what is planned, prepare wound-care and recovery questions, and build a private plan for your surgical team.
Deroofing, excision and recovery: what to clarify before the procedure
HS operations range from a small outpatient deroofing to a wider excision with substantial wound care afterwards. “HS surgery” on its own does not tell you which of these you are facing.
This page replaces none of your surgical appointments. It helps you clarify what procedure, wound plan and recovery demands are actually yours, and turns the gaps into a short list of questions to bring to your surgical team.
No account needed. Nothing you enter is sent to our servers or given a link anyone else could open.
Incision and drainage, deroofing, limited excision and wider excision have different goals and leave a different wound behind. Current European guidance distinguishes these approaches explicitly, and notes that terms such as “local”, “wide” or “radical” excision are not consistently defined across studies.
That is why this tool first asks what your treatment team has called the procedure — and treats “not sure yet” as a legitimate answer.
After a deroofing or excision, the wound may be left open to heal (secondary intention), closed directly with stitches, covered with a skin graft, or reconstructed with a flap. A 2025 systematic review including 121 studies compared these closure strategies after wide excision and found differing outcomes — but the evidence remains heterogeneous and largely observational.
This page does not recommend any of these options. It only records which one is planned for you, so the right aftercare questions can be raised.
Patient information on deroofing explicitly notes that tunnels can extend further under the visible skin than can be seen from outside — so the eventual wound can turn out larger than expected.
That is a good reason to ask directly, rather than relying on how the visible lesion looks.
A procedure at the armpit mostly affects arm and shoulder movement; one at the groin or genital area mostly affects walking, sitting and friction from clothing; one at the buttock or perianal area mostly affects sitting, toileting and pressure relief.
Those demands meet very different job requirements — desk work, standing, lifting, driving or manual work. The tool connects the two into questions for your treatment team, rather than naming a fixed number of days.
Current patient guidance emphasizes that wound care after surgery is individualized and depends on location, drainage and the surrounding skin. How often the dressing is changed, which materials are needed, who does the changing, and when the first review happens should therefore be concretely clarified — not just assumed to be “sorted somehow”.
A surgical team can successfully treat one area without managing the disease elsewhere on the body. That is why this tool separately tracks whether it is clear what happens to ongoing HS medicines around the procedure, and who will keep managing your overall HS after this particular wound has healed.
It does not decide which procedure, wound closure or surgical strategy is right for you, and it predicts no wound size, healing time, return-to-work date or recurrence risk. It also gives no instruction to stop or continue any medicine.
What it can do: show you which topics commonly matter before an HS procedure, and turn them into a short, prioritized list of questions for your surgical team.
Prepare for a treatment conversationRecord a baseline in the Symptom Tracker
It takes most people five to eight minutes. You can stop and restart at any time — nothing is saved unless you print or download it yourself.
Start my surgery planNo. It assumes a procedure has already been discussed or planned with your treatment team, and only helps you understand and prepare for it.
Choose “Not sure yet”. The tool does not guess — it records that you want to ask exactly that, including a concrete question to raise.
No. Both depend too heavily on area, procedure, wound closure and individual factors. Instead, the tool helps you ask exactly that.
No. It connects your work demands with the affected area into a question for your treatment team — it never names a fixed number of days.
Only in the memory of your open browser tab — no account, nothing sent to a server of this website, and no link anyone could open. Reloading clears the plan immediately.
Not necessarily. A procedure usually treats a specific area. Whether and how your overall HS continues to be managed is a separate question, which this tool deliberately keeps open.
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This hub is reviewed on a 12-month cycle against current guideline and patient-education sources. It does not track individual product recalls or single-center protocols.
Sources are listed below with the date they were last checked.