I am fascinated with anesthesia

Ooh, I’ll have to check out those books. I write fiction, and traumatic memory tends to be a major theme in my writing.

Yeah, I seem to be mostly normal now other than extreme fatigue. There’s no telling how the meds may have affected the memory thing too, cuz they put me on my first anti-convulsant immediately afterward and it has been a brutal adjustment. Honestly, my memory was affected in other ways, like suddenly I was fifteen years back in the past, a traumatized kid again. I had received really excellent, effective treatment for PTSD and all that progress was pretty much undone overnight. It felt like every mental issue I’ve ever had in my life returned with a vengeance. But with time everything seems to be normalizing.

No lie, postictal is fucking scary. It’s made me a lot more sensitive to people with neurological conditions like dementia, or stroke victims. My biggest fear is of having it happen when I’m by myself, waking up possibly injured not having a damned clue what’s going on. But I think now that I’m on the new meds that odds of another seizure are fairly low.

I’ve been under general anesthesia quite a few times - two knee surgeries, wisdom tooth extraction, gallbladder removal, multiple endoscopies and one D&C following a miscarriage. It usually makes me nauseated, although they have ways of controlling nausea now if you tell them ahead of time. I’m always nervous going under (I seriously worry about being conscious during the procedure… it used to keep me awake at night even when I was anticipating no surgeries), so my response upon waking from general is usually pure relief that it’s over and i don’t remember any of it.

I only ever woke up once, in the middle of a colonoscopy, which I presume was because they had me under pretty light anesthesia, and i remember crying out in pain from the cramping and back under I went. Then I woke up afterward, giggling like a loon. I don’t regard it as a very traumatic experience. The colonoscopy prep you drink the night before - THAT is traumatic.

The gallbladder? Like I said, it was severely infected, I’d never been in more pain in my life, and it took them all of 20 minutes to prep me. If it crossed my mind that I might be conscious while under, I think my general thought was that it probably wouldn’t hurt any more than it already did. And I certainly woke up from surgery feeling better than I was before.

The worst time I had was coming out of the D&C, because it meant my baby was gone. I just cried and apologized for crying, but the nurse reassured me that was normal. That nurse was an angel. People are always so vulnerable in hospitals, and I have always been so lucky to get the best nurses.

One of the weird things about people with a damaged hippocampus like HM is that while they don’t form new narrative memory they actually can learn procedural memory.

So, for example, someone like HM could be taught to solve a Rubik’s cube. Once he learns how to do that, you can present him with a cube which, despite maybe not remembering even seeing one before, he can then solve rapidly on the first try.

In other words, there’s more than one sort of memory and they’re formed by different mechanisms.

So… I suppose it’s possible that even if you never consciously remember a traumatic event (like waking up during surgery) it could still affect you afterward if one of those other memory pathways get used.

With my C-section, I too felt a sensation like they were drawing across my stomach - I remember thinking it was like a felt-tipped pen and that it was kind of cool.

I’m “lucky” in that while I have had anesthesia failures, it’s been when I was awake (turns out epidurals don’t work very well on me - when they got inside I could feel pretty significant pain as they were stabbing my bladder… er, pushing it out of the way). At least that time they believed me - when I was in labor with my son, they did NOT. I’ve got pretty bad PTSD as a result of that experience.

I’ve heard of the no-pain thing - some of those TV medical mystery shows have talked about it. Kids will literally bit off bits of their tongue, they have very poor internal temperature control, and so on.

As far as “They can absolutely give you stuff so you won’t feel anything, or so that it won’t hurt.” - trouble is, stuff that makes you not feel anything doesn’t always work. The scary thing is when the medicos don’t BELIEVE you like with my son’s delivery - he was a vaginal birth, and the C-section was actually MUCH less pain overall both during and afterward. And I’ve had many dentists who could NOT get me numb - and sometimes continued anyway.

BTW - why DO they paralyze you during surgery?

I remember you posting that story before. Poor kiddo and poor you :(.

When Dweezil broke his arm at age 4, it was a nasty one that they had to set under general anesthesia. 5-6 hours of waiting around the ER for them to have an OR free (at least he had IV pain relief and dozed some during that time), and we’re in pre-op. They did not have me go in the OR with him which was good - they’d given him some sedatives but he was starting to get so upset that he was fighting the effect well before they wheeled him away. No way could I have gone in with him - he and I would both have lost it. Thankfully he had his stuffed animals with him. I don’t know how much more agitated he got in the OR and I never asked.

They must not have given you the amnesia dosage, because it definitely will do that.

Back when I was 17, I had to have knee surgery, and the anesthesiologist came in, while I was sitting up chatting outside the OR with the orthopedic surgeon’s nurse (she was really cute), and gave me Versed in my IV. I remember telling him “I’m not going to remember anything once you give me that, huh?” and he asked how I knew that, and I told him I’d read about the KGB using it in a Tom Clancy novel for interrogations.

Next thing I remember is waking up in the post-op recovery room- no recollection whatsoever of going into the ER, getting onto the table, being strapped down, putting the mask on, etc… Very, very weird and disorienting.

When I had a D&C a couple years ago, they gave me a dose of diazepam during surgery prep. It was … OMG … the most delicious feeling I’ve ever experienced. When they wheeled me into the operating room, the OR nurse saw that I was enjoying myself and said “I see you had your drugs.” And I was like “YUP!” She leaned over me while she fitted the oxygen mask, giggling right along with me, and said, “Tell you what. Imma give you some more.”

And that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up in recovery.

Best surgery experience ever.

After getting a full Achilles rupture on the squash court I remember just before going into surgery the sketchy anesthesiologist with an indeterminate (most likely German?) accent talking to me with a leering, eel-like creepiness, sort of like Christopher Waltz talking you to sleep.
Yeah general anesthetic’s god-awful; felt like shit for a day afterwards.

On youtube they sometimes have some pretty interesting and informative stuff on the subject, like here, if you go right directly to the 3:00 mark…

I had surgery (septoplasty) back in 1989 and I definitely remember being taken into the OR and getting on the table - was so terrified, I was telling dirty jokes to distract myself. When I had my gallbladder out in 2010, the last thing I remember is being in the pre-op area after they got my IV started. I assume I was “awake” for the transfer to the OR - I’m not a small person and I’m certain it would have been a lot easier for them to have me transfer myself to the table, but I have zero memory of it. Those amnestics are amazing.

Thanks. Yeah, as you can tell, it freaked me out. Fortunately, he is about to start college and there’s been plenty of time for him to realize that Daddy still loves him :wink:

Thank gosh you had the stuffed animals in your situation. The kids are so anxious at that point. I see what the docs in my situation wanted, but still…

For my surgeries over the past few years, I was awake when going into the OR. Once they move me from my prep gurney to the operating gurney, then they put the mask over my face, I’m gone. I wonder if at the same time they’re injecting something in my IV. Don’t they also intubate you?

I suppose having a stable operating field (ie, a patient who isn’t thrashing all over the place) is good for the surgeon too. Basically, you’re a piece of meat, living and breathing, but still…

The one surgery where I remember going into the OR, they didn’t do anything with a mask until the IV meds had done their magic. No clue what they did when I had my gallbladder surgery. Given my tendency to get slightly panicky when I feel something is impeding my ability to breathe (I can’t wear tight turtlenecks, for example, without pulling at the neck constantly to the point of tearing it) it might be a Very Bad Thing if they masked me while awake.

And they definitely intubate unless you’re having just deep sedation or something, as far as I understand it. Lets them control the airway versus having to deal with an emergency if, say, you regurgitate, plus I assume the paralytics they give you would also affect the breathing muscles.