Discovery Health was showing this program again…and quite frankly, I find it one of the most horrifying things to contemplate.
This poor woman was having her eye removed and she could feel and hear everything, down to the disco music playing in the operating room. Apparently, one must tug rather hard to remove an eye from the skull. :eek:
Another woman was having a hernia operation, and was awake (but paralyzed) for the entire three hour procedure. As I understand it, there are two (?) drugs administered, one a hypnotic to put you under, and another to paralyze you. Sometimes the hypnotic one wears off…but not the paralyzing one. So you can feel everything, down to the cauterization of the wound, but you can’t move.
According to one of the anesthesiologists, about 40,000 patients a year are “awareness victims.” He said considering the amount of surgeries performed each year, this is a small percentage, but he acknowledged that the statistic is small comfort if you are one of the unlucky ones.
So, Doper Docs, is this anything I have to worry about? Has it ever happened to you, or one of your collegues? I understand that there is new monitoring equipment for anesthesiologists. Has it cut down on the number of “awareness victims?”
I remember reading a thread about this before, including a few first hand testimonials. The wors… well, the second worst part was the absolute refusal of so many doctors to admit that this ever even happens. I got pissed off just reading about it. I can understand that they have concerns about liability and whatnot, but if you remove someone’s kidney and they can feel everything you do, at the very least you could say “Sorry.”
The woman that had the hernia operation…her anesthesiologist came into her room, shaking, so he knew he’d f—ed up. He offered to give her something to put her to sleep. She told him it was too late, she needed it during the surgery, and banished it from her room.
This happened to a good friend of mine, as they were putting rods and screws into her ankle and various other parts of her leg. It really screwed her up mentally. A few weeks later her husband woke up in the middle of the night to find her running naked around their apartment, screaming. What makes it worse is that she was going to need several more operations to make her better, and she’ll never be able to subject herself to that again, so she’s stuck in a half-treated state.
I had a period of awareness during surgery, oddly enough eye surgery as well. I remember listening to the surgeon discuss the instrument being used with another physician, and I chimed in “I downloaded an article from Ocular Surgery News and they recommended a number 11”. He replied “Well, we’re going to use a number 15” and then told the anesthetist “Take him down a little more”. That was the last I knew until I woke up in recovery. During the time I was conscious I had the sensation of pain, but it did not seem all that important, as if it were happening to someone else. The surgeon told my wife about it, and she always uses it as an example of my backseat driving.
I’ve had a goodly number of surgeries for someone my age, say, 10 under general. Never had this experience (awareness during the procedure), but it’s one of my greatest fears about surgery!
My urologist says that there’s a monitor in the works that would monitor the patient’s brain activity during the procedure, in order to dectect this. I hope it comes soon!
There have been some recent studies done on this, and the problem appears to be a genetic mutation(s) that allows the patient to metabolize the anaesthetic faster than normal. Red-haired people also are fast metabolizers. This whole idea of fast (and slow) metabolizers is not being well-received in some parts of the medical and pharmaceutical fields because there has always been an assumption that people are genetically identical or at least very similar WRT certain drugs. Pharmaceutical companies are having to do more studies to include those with genetic mutations, and anaesthesiologists are having to be aware, and sometimes add extra testing to make sure they get the dosages right. Not all doctors are used to this yet, so they don’t even know to ask if their patient is a true red-head, or to inquire about how the patient tolerates other drugs metabolized by the same gene product.
The Straight Dope column on this subject had upset me so much that when I had to have my first operation under a general I was terrified. I was particularly concerned because when I’d had to have a local for dental work and the like, I always needed more than the doctor expected. Once when getting a filling they told me they’d reached the legal limit and couldn’t give me any more. So at the hospital I was so upset that they had to have the anaesthesiologist come pay me a special visit the night before the operation to assure me that such things are very rare. She told me that to sit around worrying about it was less reasonable than living in constant fear of being hit by a car or even struck by lightning.
I was still scared, though. :eek:
Luckily, my anaesthesia worked fine, although I did recover from it and regain full consciousness much faster than had been predicted.
I wonder if having a high resistance to pain killers (as I do), would cause this. I also have a high resitance to pain, but not THAT high. I’ve never had surgery under general, so hopefully I’ll never find out.
I have a fairly high tolerance for pain meds, and, while I always make sure to mention that to the anasthesiologist (so he may well be taking that into account), I’ve never had any trouble with general anasthesia.
I recall waking up during surgery once when I was young (4-5 years old or so). I didn’t feel anything, but I did wake up and try to sit up, while they had my abdomen cut open in at least three different places. I remember hearing various people present on the verge of panic, as well as some of them having to restrain me. The whole thing probably didn’t last more than 30 seconds (I guess they cranked up the anesthesia rather quickly).
So, I guess if it’s going to happen, the way I did it is prefeable to having the anti-pain component wear off while paralyzed.
When my stepmom was having a C-section, (I can’t remember if she got the epidural or general anesthesia) she told me that she was at least half-awake during the procedure, and could feel the doctor’s hands inside her abdomen digging the baby out :eek:
She didn’t say it was necessarily painful, just really uncomfortable. So kind of like sporadic poking/grabby sensations on your tummy. Only on the inside :eek:
yerrghhh…now I’m gonna have nightmares about this!
Ivylad will probably need more surgeries, and since he has a morphine pump under his skin, his tolerance for pain drugs is very high. Hell, oxycontin is like candy to him.
I remember reading about that, it concerned me because I am somewhat a redhead. (Started out blonde in a family of redheads, got redder as I got older). I haven’t had general anesthesia much, I had my tonsils out at 12 and I remember waking up in recovery and the nurse telling me to go back to sleep I think I woke up earlier than expected. Then when I had my wisdom teeth out I remember waking up in the middle of it, feeling pain and hearing the doctor talking - I remember him saying something about time. I couldn’t open my eyes but I was really painful and I started to panic, I think I managed to moan and I heard the doctor say she’s waking up, then I guess they gave me more drugs and put me back under.
I have zip in the way of resistance to drugs - unless the headache is a migraine, just walking past a bottle of aspirin seems to make it go away. I exaggerate, of course, but not by much. A half dose of pseudoephedrine and I’m out cold for nine hours. I am, however, completely immune to the hypnotic drugs. I had a cystoscopy under that half-anasthaesia they call “twilight sleep” - where they want you functional and able to respond, but not remember anything after. I remember everything so clearly I could now PERFORM this procedure. Later, another doctor told me that approximately 2-3% of the population is immune to hypnotics.
My husband, who has extremely high resistance to most drugs, had a similar procedure under similar anasthaesia conditions, and shortly afterward I had the single most hilarious conversation with him EVER. His short-term memory was so completely wiped out that for twenty minutes, it was like conversing with Dory from Finding Nemo.
