8 votes

Under anesthesia, where do our minds go? To better understand our brains and design safer anesthesia, scientists are turning to EEG

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  1. [2]
    mtset
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    When I had a surgery in my teens, I was under anesthesia for about an hour while surgeons opened my body, removed an unwanted part, and closed it back up. Subjectively, my experience was that I...

    When I had a surgery in my teens, I was under anesthesia for about an hour while surgeons opened my body, removed an unwanted part, and closed it back up. Subjectively, my experience was that I lay down on a gurney with an IV in my arm, heard the anesthesiologist count down from 10 to about 4, and instantly opened my eyes to see a very nice nurse offering me an orange juice.

    I convalesced for a few days, spent months unable to sit properly, and eventually forgot about the whole thing except as a line item in my chart - "cyst removal." The only mark on my body is a subtle scar hidden towards my lower back.

    Throughout college, I had horrible nightmares; I couldn't walk into my dorm hallway at night, with its clinical white walls and buzzing florescent lights, without triggering... something. As a long time SCP Foundation fan and occasional writer, these terrors sometimes took the form of one of the fictional entities from that universe, and sometimes were entirely formless.

    I spent over a year in therapy trying to deal with this, revisiting various upsetting incidents in my life. Was it moving trauma from living in an academic family? What it because my father was a drunk? What about the time I stabbed a pencil through both cheeks as a toddler?

    Nothing helped until I found a therapist who was experienced in brainspotting and EMDR. She suggested my surgery might have been the culprit, and directed me to some studies and writing on anesthesia awareness. Focusing therapy on that experience, including spending far more time that I initially thought was reasonable searching my field of vision for points of discomfort, made me realize that this terror response was due to suppressed or unconscious memories of being paralyzed, surrounded by medical professionals in glasses and masks, being cut into and rearranged - something my body and subconscious mind, quite reasonably, did not like very much!

    Recognizing this has helped immensely. I've been able to largely move past this "transient PTSD", as it's called, and only occasionally have trauma dreams these days.

    Still, I'm terrified of ever going under anesthesia again, and I definitely welcome research like this so nobody else has to go through such a thing, even as a side effect of an important medical procedure.

    5 votes
    1. cfabbro
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Makes you wonder how many other people are unknowingly suffering from similar effects, doesn’t it? :( I have only been under general anesthesia once, for reconstructive knee surgery, and...

      Makes you wonder how many other people are unknowingly suffering from similar effects, doesn’t it? :(

      I have only been under general anesthesia once, for reconstructive knee surgery, and thankfully didn’t seem to suffer for it. But the prospect of something going wrong if I ever have to go under again is still pretty terrifying, especially since EEG monitoring is apparently not standard either. So you could still be fully aware and the surgeons and anesthesiologist would have no way of knowing.

      5 votes