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Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

mosaicscience.com

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Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#71

Post by tejohnso »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #14

"This all makes anaesthesia as much art as science" This is one of the most important parts of the piece. It is something that most people out side of healthcare are not aware. Anaesthesia is very much an art. Anaesthesia is unlike other medications, "take xx mg over yy days." Anaesthesia effects can vary wildly from person to person. Weight plays a big role, but so does bed position, condition, sex, body part etc. T…

Reminds me of this somewhat relevant post about the mysteries of Anesthesia

https://medium.com/@lukehollomon/anesthesia-works-on-plants-...

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#72

Post by yboris »

Here's something worse: for a while, curare was used on children when undergoing surgery. Turns out that rather than anesthetizing them, it simply paralyzed them. Kids came out of surgery describing how they felt the surgery, and doctors just insisted that that was post-surgery nightmares.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#73

Post by Der_Einzige »

lr4444lr wrote: post #28

Just an anecdote: I once had a procedure that required I be under a "light" general anesthesia (don't recall which). I was generally paranoid at the time though about everything, and strapped an audio recorder to my leg secretly. Turns out I did wake up mid procedure (the audio suggests doctor and nurse rushed to stop me from touching the area of operation of my face, and that I was distressed) but as the doctor prom…

Sorry, but there is nothing else to say except that you are extremely wrong. This kind of belief is exactly why male circumcision is not seen for the evil that it is. Please try to consider the possibility that trauma without conscious memory can have disastrous results - as other commenters are trying to get you to understand...

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#74

Post by darkerside »

bloak wrote: post #18
darkerside wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with it. Just because it ends doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I can't decide whether I agree or not. For an extra level of weirdness, imagine the person who caused the accident collecting the damages. It's not very improbable: you could be driving a car with your parents as passengers and you crash it, through honest incompetence, without committing a criminal offence, and they die, painfully, while you survive. Your insurance pays money into the estate for the pain your parent…

Separate note. Don't make the mistake of thinking meaning and life are binary. People too often think life is meaningful (everything is eternally meaningful) or completely meaningless. Allow that neither of those are true, and that all things carry some meaning for some amount of time.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#75

Post by nefitty »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #39
lr4444lr wrote: post #28

Just an anecdote: I once had a procedure that required I be under a "light" general anesthesia (don't recall which). I was generally paranoid at the time though about everything, and strapped an audio recorder to my leg secretly. Turns out I did wake up mid procedure (the audio suggests doctor and nurse rushed to stop me from touching the area of operation of my face, and that I was distressed) but as the doctor prom…

I wonder if the journalist is asking the wrong people. Instead of interviewing patients supposed to be under drug-induced amnesia, and finding the few who remembered, ask the doctors and nurses who are being asked to restrain patients in distress. A specialist in a procedure that requires light general anesthesia would, if this was true, have done surgery on thousands of people in various degrees of distress. To me,…

My initial intuition to your last question was, “No, suffering usually entails some sort of looking-back process that places the pain in that context.”

I then realized that animals can suffer, and either I’m confounding Buddhist and Western psychological definitions of suffering, or suffering doesn’t require consciousness of it occurring for it to be suffering.

I hope that makes sense!

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#76

Post by tectonic »

lr4444lr wrote: post #28

Just an anecdote: I once had a procedure that required I be under a "light" general anesthesia (don't recall which). I was generally paranoid at the time though about everything, and strapped an audio recorder to my leg secretly. Turns out I did wake up mid procedure (the audio suggests doctor and nurse rushed to stop me from touching the area of operation of my face, and that I was distressed) but as the doctor prom…

By this argument, living an entire life of suffering and then not remembering it when you’re dead would mean that it doesn’t matter and all suffering can be ignored. I hope that’s not the ethical code we settle on.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#77

Post by StavrosK »

yboris wrote: post #72

Here's something worse: for a while, curare was used on children when undergoing surgery. Turns out that rather than anesthetizing them, it simply paralyzed them. Kids came out of surgery describing how they felt the surgery, and doctors just insisted that that was post-surgery nightmares.

That's too bad, it seems like a pretty easy to confirm, but I suspect nobody gave a crap.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#78

Post by trhway »

lr4444lr wrote: post #28

Just an anecdote: I once had a procedure that required I be under a "light" general anesthesia (don't recall which). I was generally paranoid at the time though about everything, and strapped an audio recorder to my leg secretly. Turns out I did wake up mid procedure (the audio suggests doctor and nurse rushed to stop me from touching the area of operation of my face, and that I was distressed) but as the doctor prom…

>pain with no memory

reverse situation - all the memory and no pain. I had a surgery on my nose done under local, and it was kind of unreal experience when the surgeon stopped cutting and took what looked like a typical woodworking chisel and a small hammer and started to chisel away the bone in my nose - all without any pain, my head is just like a piece of wood - the force would transfer and the back of my head would feel the pressure every time the hammer would fall and the scraping vibrations of the chiseling would just reverberate through the scull. ... More than 20 years later ENT here was genuinely curious where did i get such a nice job done. USSR military surgeon :) And back in the USSR my mother had her appendix removed under local too, and the surgeon was communicating to her various stages of the surgery, like what he is going to do and how that may be felt/perceived.

I wonder about the merits of those different approaches. (very handwavy as IANAD) With the local the pain doesn't seem to reach the central nervous system. With the sedation or general it reaches i suppose, yet the central nervous system has no reaction. If one supposes that the strong pain may be a kind of neuron pathway/connection altering signal ("EEPROM burning"), it would be plausible to expect that that unfelt or felt-and-forgotten at the time pain under sedation or general may still have some effects down the road.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#79

Post by intergalplan »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #33

Wow, this lady has 2 to 3 nightmares per night even ten years later, after an exploratory surgery? That's pretty extreme, I think most people wouldn't have had 6 to 8 thousand nightmares about this experience.

My dominant (practically exclusive, actually) nightmare for over 20 years involved forgetting a class schedule or where a classroom was. Initially triggered by the (enormous) middle school I attended for the first half of 6th grade, then it morphed into a whole new set of very-similar nightmares after I started attending college. I'm sure I had thousands of those nightmares. Hell, I so rarely remember any of my dreams on waking these days (used to recall a detailed, ordered history of my dreams each morning, without even trying) that for all I know I'm still having them several times a week without realizing it.

I'd believe thousands of nightmares over the span of a decade, for a traumatic surgery experience.

Re: Waking Up During Surgery (2019)

#80

Post by 99_00 »

tectonic wrote: post #76
lr4444lr wrote: post #28

Just an anecdote: I once had a procedure that required I be under a "light" general anesthesia (don't recall which). I was generally paranoid at the time though about everything, and strapped an audio recorder to my leg secretly. Turns out I did wake up mid procedure (the audio suggests doctor and nurse rushed to stop me from touching the area of operation of my face, and that I was distressed) but as the doctor prom…

By this argument, living an entire life of suffering and then not remembering it when you’re dead would mean that it doesn’t matter and all suffering can be ignored. I hope that’s not the ethical code we settle on.

No need to be concerned. Exactly zero people are concluding that suffering can be ignored because someone is ok with not remembering pain during a medically necessary surgery.
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