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.