Hi Everyone,
I thought that I would write something on a segment I saw on the Discovery Health Channel tonight. I find it kind of ironic that on the eve of a major surgery I turn on my favorite station and they were starting a show called, "When Anesthesia Fails." So now I am up at 5:30am EST unable to sleep because of what I saw.
To preface, if you don't know, when you have surgery and they are giving you general anesthesia "putting you under" they also give you a paralytic to prevent you, if you wake up too soon from pulling your breathing tube out ect and they tape you eyes closed... So in this show it consisted of stories where the anesthesia either didn't work or they woke up in the middle of the procedure but because of the paralytic agent they had no way of signaling to the stall that they were awake. So they had to lie there bearing the pain of the incisions and surgery.
This terrifies me because in 5.5 hours I am "going under" to have major surgery in my abdomen having to do with my reproductive organs. They have to remove fibroid from the uterus, remove endometriosis that has grown and if the endometriosis has wrecked any of the organ, removal of them also (like one of my ovaries). Surgery itself scares me, and I am a trauma surgeon! (3rd year resident) I'd rather have control of the knife.
The anesthesiologists need to come up with better ways of either detecting awareness or better forms of anesthesia.
Does this scare anyone else other than me?
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ive never had surgery, but i have heard about anesthesia failing and everytime it creeps me out...they really do need to come out with something that wont wear out that too soon...
As I am sure you know, anasthesia is a dangerous business. Over doing it can kill a person and underdoing it can lead to people waking up during surgery. Frankly I am a big fan of ansthetics that also screw with your memory, so even if it did fail the horrible pain would be pretty sketchy.
Some people are naturally insensitive to anasthetics, or have grown a tolerance due to drug use. I kind of imagine very large people are at more risk of a bad outcome when going under. Even if you do wake up, would it even be possible to re-dose or stop the surgery? Probably they have to finish and another dose of anasthetic is pushing the overdose line.
Res ipsa loquitur.
memor mori, mahalo.
I got through the surgery ok and am curled up in bed. You get a serious sore throat from the intubation.
-L
"We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."