Bed Mobility & Sleep Guides for Cardiac Surgery Recovery

After open-heart surgery, your sternum has been sawed in half and wired back together. It will heal, but for the next 6–12 weeks, you cannot push, pull, or lift with your arms — which is exactly how most people turn in bed. You reach for the mattress edge, grab, and haul yourself over. That’s off the table now. The sternal wires hold your breastbone together, but any significant force through your arms, chest, or upper body risks shifting those wires before the bone knits. So you lie on your back, afraid to move, and the lack of position changes makes everything else worse — back pain, shoulder stiffness, poor sleep.

The mechanical constraint is specific: your upper body cannot generate or transmit pulling or pushing force. That eliminates the arm-grab turn, the push-up-to-sit manoeuvre, and even bracing yourself with your hands as you roll. What you still have is your legs, your hips, and gravity. The turn has to come from below the sternum — a leg-driven, hip-initiated roll that moves your trunk as a passive log while your lower body does all the work. This is learnable, but it’s not intuitive, and most cardiac surgery patients aren’t taught it before discharge.

The guides below cover the no-arms log-roll for turning in bed, a leg-push method for getting to the edge of the bed, and a sit-to-stand sequence that avoids the arm push-off that most people rely on. They also address the fear factor — the constant worry that one wrong move will pop a sternal wire. These techniques work within standard sternal precautions. Always follow your cardiac surgery team’s specific instructions; these guides complement, not replace, their advice.