My pre-op sheet says stop the fish oil but says nothing at all about the tablets I take every day for my arthritis. Do I stop those too?

Lift booked for 12 January and I've finally got the pre-op paperwork, which is one side of A4 and appears to have been photocopied about nine times.

What it says: stop fish oil, stop vitamin E, stop "herbal preparations", stop anything containing aspirin. What it does not say, anywhere: a single word about the anti-inflammatory tablets I take most days for my hands, which I have taken for six years and which are the only reason I can open a jar.

So I've got myself into a stupid loop. Are they not on the list because they're fine, or are they not on the list because the list is generic and nobody has actually looked at MY medicines? And the bit that's really bothering me: if I stop them for a fortnight over Christmas my hands are going to be horrible and I'll have nothing to take instead. I don't want to ring and sound like a difficult patient before I've even got there.

Ring them. You are not a difficult patient, you are a patient with a medication question, which is approximately the least difficult thing a pre-op nurse hears all week.

And I'd flip your loop around: the sheet doesn't mention your arthritis tablets because the sheet doesn't know you exist. It's a photocopy. It is not a personalised plan and it was never meant to be read as one. The personalised bit is the conversation you have when you ring up and say "I take X every day, what am I doing with it".

One thing I'd add from my own pre-op: they asked me to bring the actual boxes and I thought it was faff, and then I got two of them wrong from memory in the appointment. Wrong in both directions. I'd forgotten something I take daily and confidently named something I'd finished months before. Take the bag.

The supplements bit catches everyone, because nobody thinks of a capsule from a health food shop as a drug. I declared precisely none of mine at my first consultation, not out of dishonesty, it just did not occur to me that they counted. Fish oil, turmeric, a magnesium thing, a "joint complex" whose ingredients I could not have told you.

When it came up at the pre-op the nurse was completely unbothered and just wrote them down, but she did say the thing I've repeated ever since: they can't see any of it. It isn't on your GP record, it isn't on any system, it only exists if you say it out loud.

Cheryl, on your actual question, I'd be careful about the assumption that stopping is automatically the safe option. It isn't always. Stopping things you need has its own consequences and that's a judgement, not a default.

Cheryl, ring them, and here is the reasoning so the call is a short and useful one.

Nearly every instruction on that photocopied sheet traces back to one complication. Haematoma, a collection of blood under the lifted skin, is the most common thing that goes wrong after a facelift, reported at roughly 1 to 7% depending on the study and technique, and much more common in men, in smokers and in people with high blood pressure. A facelift lifts the skin as a flap and leaves a large raw surface underneath, so anything that makes you bleed slightly more freely, or that pushes your blood pressure up in the hours afterwards, shifts those odds. That is the entire logic of the list, and the site sets the rest of it out in medications, supplements and blood pressure before a facelift.

Your anti-inflammatory tablets are relevant to exactly that mechanism, which is precisely why they should not be dealt with by a patient reading between the lines of a generic sheet. The right handling is that the surgeon and the doctor who prescribes them decide together what stops, what continues and when, and if something does need pausing, what you take instead so you are not spending Christmas unable to open a jar. That substitution question is a normal one and there are usually answers to it.

Two things worth saying more generally. First, do not stop a prescribed medicine on your own initiative because of something you read, here included. Some are genuinely hazardous to interrupt, and the ones people most often assume should be stopped, blood pressure medicines, are frequently continued straight through, because controlled blood pressure is on the surgeon's side in this. Second, Annelise is right about the supplements and I would go further: declare anything you swallow on purpose and let the surgeon decide what is irrelevant. That includes vapes, patches and nicotine gum, which sit in the same conversation for a different reason set out in facelift and smoking.

Ask for the list in writing with the timings on it rather than the drug names alone, and ask for the restart instructions too, because when things resume afterwards matters as much as when they stop and is very often left out.

Lurking on this one because my pre-op is in February and my sheet is going to be just as generic. Adding "ask for the restart instructions" to my list, because it had genuinely never occurred to me that there would be a coming-back-on side to it.

Closing the loop for anyone who finds this while staring at their own photocopy at nine at night.

I rang. It took eleven minutes. The answer was not the one I'd assumed: my arthritis tablets did need pausing, but they sorted an alternative with my GP so I wasn't left with nothing, and the window was shorter than the fortnight I'd catastrophised about. The fish oil, which I had been agonising over, turned out to be the least interesting thing I mentioned.

Lift went ahead on 12 January and I'm a week and a bit out and vertical. The one thing I'd pass on: I took the carrier bag of boxes and the nurse went through it in about two minutes and found something I'd never have thought to mention. Take the bag.