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Waking up during surgery

mosaicscience.com

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Re: Waking up during surgery

#41

Post by rofo1 »

zoba wrote: post #6

Wouldn't your heart rate increase to alarming levels? If you were awake & in pain during surgery, you would (of course) freak out. Even if you were paralyzed, your heart rate would increase and the doctors would know. This is what a doctor once told me when I asked. I'm not sure how to contrast that with what the article says.

Just my experience, but I didn't wake up during the surgery; I had a surgery with half of my body paralyzed. My vital signs remained stable (in particular, heart rate I was watching the whole surgery live, so to say, but I was also a little bit sedated. Felt no pain, though.

Re: Waking up during surgery

#42

Post by winrid »

JshWright wrote: post #23
winrid wrote: post #3

I recently had a foot injury. In the ER they put me under and the (fantastic) surgeon "twisted" the foot back into place. I don't remember anything, however other people said I was moaning in pain while under anesthesia. Pretty weird.

Anesthesia and analgesia are two different things. There are also different types of anesthetics. For "procedural sedation" (the sort of thing you would do in the ER), it's common to simply use a dissociative agent (like Ketamine), so you aren't really "out", you just aren't "in" either.

Wow! Fascinating, thanks.

Re: Waking up during surgery

#43

Post by fifteenforty »

ThePadawan wrote: post #38
fifteenforty wrote: post #26

As an anaesthesiologist (well, senior trainee), I hesitate to comment on this, but here goes nothing... I think it’s important to remember that the vast majority of anaesthesia delivered does not involve ‘general anaesthesia’ nor neuromuscular blocking drugs. Most patient’s experience of anaesthesia is sedation, where the aim is comfort, not absence of recall. There is a bit of a movement to reduce our reliance on ne…

Very interesting. I cannot recall having sedation outside of dental practices, but I have had several colonoscopies which involved counting down from 10, getting to about 8 and waking up hours later in recovery. Interesting to see I'm sort of an outlier.

You probably (depending on your location) had so-called ‘deep sedation’ for your colonoscopies, which usually involves reasonable doses of anaesthetic drugs, likely leading to complete amnesia. The crucial point is that we don’t necessarily promise no recall, that’s a side effect of maintain comfort and facilitating the procedure.
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