The difficulty with this is that these are all subjective accounts. I would think that if one were awake and feeling the surgery there would be obvious effects in the vital signs that are monitored very closely during surgery. The pulse would rise due to fear and the “fight or flight” reaction, which is due to adrenaline release. The blood pressure would also rise. These reactions are not damped by anesthesia if the anesthesia is inappropriately “light” for the procedure, and the anesthetist or anesthesiologist is trained to recognize levels of anesthesia.
I am an RN, and have worked in areas where surgery is performed–I have been a scrub nurse, circulating nurse and post-anesthesia recovery nurse. I have also done labor care, and I am accustomed to clients telling me that their epidurals and other nerve blocks didn’t work. These people DO feel pressure that is quite aversive, but I can assure you that they do not feel what those doing Natural Childbirth do–the level of distress evinced, along with physical effects of such distress (sweating, trembling, disorganized behavior, vocal expressions of pain, inadvertant movement, inablility to focus on care-givers due to the intensity of their distraction by powerful stimuli, changes in vital signs, others) is clearly not there. Many times these clients have not had natural childbirth to compare their sensations under regional anesthesia vs. those without it. It is true that some regional blocks do not do as much as expected, but clients experiencing this are clearly distressed by the criteria I gave above.
I would assume that awareness during anesthesia is similar, or that anesthesia has evoked a type of altered conciousness in which fearful fantasies are expressed; a dream-state of a kind. That being said, I don’t know why vital sign changes wouldn’t be observed if that occured, and I have no idea how these assertions could be tested. Anesthesia is something we don’t thoroughly understand, just as we don’t understand conciousness, and I am loathe to dismiss patient accounts, since subjective accounts of pain are the only ones we have.
There can be no doubt that some people react differently than we expect, because that is something humans always do!
I’ve wondered about some of these things. One would think the patient’s adrenaline level would skyrocket. Is that something that can be monitored in real-time?
I’ve seen various news articles and horror stories over the years about this, and not one of them has mentioned anything one way or another about the possibility of monitoring various chemical levels in the blood like this.
I know that the patient’s breath is monitored for various gas levels. Might there be something there that could measure the patient’s awareness?
Well, in the cases that I’ve read there was an increase in blood pressure, pulse. And I’ve heard of cases where the patient was able to describe the conversations, and/or music that was playing.
One of the cases I read about were horrific, the person described the feeling of the knife cutting into their body, hearing the anesthesiologist remarking in the spike of blood pressure, etc.
I know it doesn’t happen often, and I tend to go under easily, so it’s something I generally don’t worry about.
Seems like there’s more research to be done on this somehow - I’ve got to figure if these people have really had these experiences that they’d make ideal test subjects, if they’re willing to try just a test that doesn’t involve actually cutting into them…
For my sake, I don’t recall anything during anesthesia, but I tend to require a lot more of it than normal and I wake up quickly afterwards, but my actual muscle function wakes up as fast as my brain so I’m not going to worry too much…
I have some odd memories from an appendectomy when I was eight – I remember the operating room walls and ceiling, the light, I remember the radio was on and the surgeon or surgeons were laughing and joking with each other although I could not remember what they said. I don’t remember any bodily sensations. It was a horrific event in my life – I nearly died because my mother didn’t take my complaints seriously, and the incision got infected afterward. Still have a giant scar. I don’t know if the OR experience was connected to the other things.
A friend of mine - someone I know personally quite well - had this happen to her during knee surgery. She was awake and felt everything, but could not move. The hospital didn’t believe her at first until she repeated verbatim some of the conversations the doctors had during surgery. That’s not an altered consciousness dream state. She was awake. It also seriously messed her up mentally for years, but that’s off topic.
When I had oral surgery I woke up during it, I could hear what they were saying but could not see anything it was black, I wonder if they put pads over your eyes?
During surgery to repair my broken nose, I had some period of time where I wasn’t entirely blacked out. I wanted to swallow, but couldn’t, I could hear the MDs talking, stereotypically enough, about golf, and I could feel the sensation of what felt like a hammer and chisel on my nose. No pain. Sadly, although I wanted very much to repeat back to the surgeon some of the conversation I’d heard, I lost it, rather like you lose dreams. It is also very possible that as I arose from deep sedation the anesthesiologist noticed something and lowered me back down.
So all in all it was a wierd experience, but not painful or frightening as I clearly was still pretty sedated/anesthetized.