So, tomorrow morning I’m going in to a general surgeon’s office to have two painful lumps removed, one from my left upper arm and one from my right leg (on the inner thigh, a couple inches above the knee). They’re both roughly spherical, somewhere between 1-2 centimeters in diameter, and about an inch under the skin.
So what kind of anesthesia can I expect? Will they just numb my arm and leg somehow, or is this the kind of thing that will require general anesthesia? I was thinking that surely they wouldn’t knock me out for a simple office-visit surgery, but then I remembered how the oral surgeon did precisely that when he removed my wisdom teeth, so maybe it isn’t as big a deal as I thought.
So what’s the straight dope on something like this? Is it even feasible to numb my arm and leg enough that I won’t feel a surgeon slicing up my arm and leg and pulling something out?
Entirely feasible. When we do in-office surgeries, the local anesthesia is just the doctor’s preference- from plain lidocaine with no epinephrine to different mixtures of lido and epi. I don’t know what your surgeon will use, as we don’t remove lipomas, which is what your growths sound like, but we do remove cysts and do other excisions that go down to the fat. Sutures are a wonderful thing- they can do inside sutures and then outside ones, and they’re pretty strong.
Oh, and there’s also “twilight” anesthesia, which is general but doesn’t put you entirely under, which might be what your oral surgeon used- many people fall asleep from it.
Just as an update: it turns out they weren’t doing the surgery yesterday after all, just getting the surgeon’s opinion. He gave me the choice of in-office surgery with just numbing, or surgery-center surgery with an anesthesiologist administering “twilight” anesthesia, as Alice the Goon mentioned. I chose the latter because I prefer to be sedated when somebody’s slicing me open.