At home, he began checking his email and returning urgent calls. Once back at the office, he found it difficult to sit at his desk for long periods, and he felt pain if he turned the wrong way.

When an executive has surgery, it can't always be scheduled in advance. Lisa Hammond was dancing with her husband at his surprise 40th birthday party at a nightclub in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, when he stumbled and knocked her to the ground. After her rotator-cuff surgery, she was told not to work for at least a week. That first night, heavily medicated and with her arm in a sling, she tried unsuccessfully to type an article with one hand. (Frustrated, she called her publicist to complete the job.) Within 24 hours she was back in her Las Vegas office, wearing the sling and with an intravenous pump dangling from her arm. "My staff suggested I return home," she says. She was back at work for good within four or five days.

Advances in technology have certainly made it easier for these overachievers to continue working from their bedrooms while recovering from surgery. That may not always be a good thing, as Allan Whitescarver, recently learned after undergoing surgery to remove a torn medial meniscus incurred while fly-fishing. Whitescarver, the chief communications officer for San Francisco law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, felt free of pain in the hours after his surgery, thanks to the afterglow of general anesthesia. Feeling voluble, he sent an email to one of the corporate law partners. "My thoughts were a little disorganized and somewhat loopy," says Whitescarver, who declined to reveal the exact content of the email. "It was uncharacteristically introspective, rambling, and abstract. More like a stream of consciousness."

Sometimes surgeons find out that an executive has returned to work too soon from a concerned spouse. "Spouses can be the biggest rats," says Frempong-Boadu. "They'll call and say, ‘My husband went back to work on day four, not on day 10.' "

The worst thing to do, according to Bradley Weiner, is to forgo physical therapy. Weiner says that he has been told by several executives that they are too busy for rehab.

Hammond, 40,  says that after surgery, physical therapy felt like a "part-time job," with two hours scheduled every day for eight weeks. The therapy sometimes extended her workday to 11 p.m. "I was told, ‘If you want mobility back in your arm, you'll go to physical therapy,' " she says.

Frempong-Boadu says those who are the most recalcitrant about physical therapy can reappear at the office feeling pain-ridden. Generally, these patients take far longer to heal. "We have a conversation about therapy and about lifestyle changes," he says. "We set up an environment to heal, but the patients have to make it possible."