I had my wisdom teeth taken out in an oral surgeon's office when I was 19 and that is the only time I have ever had general anesthesia. Here's what I remember. First, I lay down and the nurses put monitors on me. I started hearing beeping noises and was reassured that that was merely my own heartbeat. Then they started an IV, put a mask over my nose, and...
Then I was lying sideways on a cart in the recovery room, groggy, with my sister imploring me to get up so that she could drive me home. Apparently surgery was done, which was very confusing to me, because I had last remembered the monitors and the mask, with a few people milling around me. Later that evening, she also informed me that I had been given a whole litany of postoperative instructions during that time in the recovery room, none of which I remembered. Strangely, at least to me, the nurse gave those instructions knowing I wouldn't remember them, but told them to me anyway. Thank goodness for my sister.
With maybe a few changes in syntax, that is what the vast majority of people experience when they get a general anesthetic. It is a wonderful thing that we are able to do by managing the various drugs at our disposal. A surgical operation, be it 10 minutes or 10 hours, always feels to the patient as though it took 10 seconds. But what happens in between? That is what a log of this blog is intending to look at, and in the next few entries, I just want to go through, step by step, just exactly what is happening from the anesthesiologist's perspective while you are asleep in surgery.
