As a compliment to the thread about near death experiences I’d really like hearing people’s experiences of losing consciousness under general anesthesia and what’s it like coming back.
Also interested of things anesthetists may have noticed about this during their career.
Life just stops. It’s like there was a portion deleted from your living record. No thoughts. No dreams. No fuzzy memories at the edge of thought that you can’t quite recall. None of that stuff you get even when blackout drunk. One moment you’re alive, counting or talking to the nurse, then suddenly you’re back and someone’s removed a piece of your body and apparently a piece of your timeline.
This is the correct answer. It’s a complete lack of experiencing anything. Not black, not darkness, but simply nothing. Before the general anesthesia you’ll feel high, and when you’re coming out of the general anesthesia you’ll be groggier than you’ve ever been in your life, but the time during general anesthesia simply won’t exist for you.
Oh god the grogginess. One of the worst feelings
IMO it’s not a big deal as long as you know to expect it. If you know about it then you won’t be fighting crazy hard against it and thinking that something is wrong with you that you can’t make yourself fully awake. If you know about it before it happens then you know to not fight it, just relax and wait for the drugs to wear out of your system. They really should tell patients to expect the grogginess right before they’re put under.
Yes, a few times. Each time I went from feeling awake and alert to suddenly being somewhere else and feeling groggy and hungry. Nothing strange otherwise.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 15•2 years ago
Instantaneous time warp. One moment, I’m relaxing on the table before the procedure. Next moment, I’m being told the procedure’s done.
It’s like a human
SIGSTOP, for all you programmers out there.Yeah they put the tube in and I woke up 6 hours later. I was literally turned off and on.
Nothing. You breathe twice, then blackout. You wake up in a bedroom, feels like an unpleasant and quite huge hangover. Then, as the anesthesia fades away, you might feel the pain coming progressively (depending on what you have).
The profound nothingness is almost hard to believe. I’m not talking an empty sleep—I mean it feels like someone cut a segment out of the film strip of your life.
The first time I was fully knocked out like that was for tooth surgery, and I thought the doctor was messing with me when he said they were done already—from my perspective I had barely closed my eyes for a moment. Sure enough, there was gauze in my mouth and the sun was setting outside. It had been over 90 minutes, and I didn’t even feel like I’d slept.
Wisdoms? Same experience for me. My partner was in the room with a nurse asking me about my pain level. At first I was confused, what pain? Then as consciousness properly barrelled in I managed to sob an ‘8’ through the gauze. I preferred oblivion at that point - they had to take a big chunk of bone and boy did I know it at that moment
I was a kid when I last had it. Really uneventful. “Count backwards from 10” and you’re out by 6.
My wife had it a few months ago to fix a deviated septum. Her native language is Turkish. When she came to she was only speaking English. The doctors couldn’t understand her “but she seems fine.” I told her she was speaking Chinese just to fuck with her a bit. “Oh no! We need to get a dictionary!” It was really strange… She understood Turkish perfectly fine but was completely unable to speak it.
Other than some funny after effects, it was mostly a non-issue for her as well. She was fine after a couple hours.
Oh wait, my wife told me I was also leaning towards English a lot too when I woke up. I’m not a English native. However, I was switching to it after pauses or sentences.
Wonder how common this is.
I remember the „count backwards“ trick well. What a flex.
Counting down from 99 … 98 … 97 … Wake up after surgery.
I had to count to 10, don’t think I even made it to 3
They told me they were starting to put me to sleep (can’t remember the exact words), and I must have gone under before they finished the sentence. Next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery ward, feeling completely at peace. The most peaceful I have ever felt in my life. I fell asleep again and woke up later in the same ward.
That Propofol and/or Fentanyl sleep is something else. For about a week after surgery I slept the most wonderful sleep.
I don’t recall any lasting sleep benefits, but you’re absolutely right that there ain’t NOTHIN like a Propofol nap. Amazing. And when I woke up, completely, instantly awake, no grogginess or hangover effect.
No wonder MJ was addicted.
I don’t know what they gave me. I don’t recall them ever telling me. I do know that my sleep for the next three weeks sucked due to pain, and an abscess that got a little bit out of control.
Yes, just last month. It was my first time. It wasn’t a long procedure, took like 40 minutes ish. Anyway, I didn’t feel anything. I just remember them telling me that they’re gonna try to put me to sleep and that I should try to relax. Next I knew, I was waking up in recovery. I didn’t even have any idea that I was in recovery already unless I noticed that the surgical room was different.
It felt just like sleep, I didn’t even have any dizziness afterwards. When done properly, that’s how it should be.
I’ve had one surgery in my teens. I was immediately knocked out, unconscious, no dreams that I can recall. When I woke up I was so groggy I couldn’t even really move for a while, everything just felt heavy. I would just kind of look around with my eyes and then close them to try to get more sleep.
Arm feels cold as it goes in, the feeling spreads, taste of copper in the mouth… wake up in recovery. Pretty straightforward.
You pass out, and then you wake up with no memory of anything that happened in the meantime.
That is, unless they messed up the dosage and allowed you to regain consciousness. It happened to me once as a kid, I had to have a tooth removed but I was so scared that they had to put me under, but I woke up briefly during the operation and I remember the surgeon giving me nitrous oxide (I think that’s what it was, because it had this sweet smell and taste) with a mask and telling my mom (who was in the operating room), “let’s turn this down a little bit so we don’t pass out too”. Then I passed out again and woke up in the recovery unit.
I had general anesthesia, some kind of pretty strong opioid. “10… 9… 8…”, then the room felt like it was spinning very briefly before everything went black. Only thing I remember about coming out of it was a sore throat due to intubation.
Ah yes, I also remember having a sore throat after, but I don’t recall them telling me beforehand that they would intubate me.
I don’t think you can have general without intubation. To protect against aspiration or something, if not actually to breathe for you.
Yeah that makes sense. It wasn’t something I had considered before the op.
Isn’t it because they paralyse you and your lungs stop working?
I don’t know the answer to that.
I actually have a story. I was very young and was under for 10 hours. It was terrible, I felt every moment, I was trapped in a video game, Link’s Adventure. Just repeating over and over. This isn’t a joke, the experience was so traumatizing I won’t go through surgery again. This was over three decades ago. I don’t know what went wrong, why I experienced the passage of time. I thought I had literally gone to Hell, it was torture.
Yes, when my wisdom teeth were pulled. They said, “count backwards from 10.” I said, “10, 9, 8, 7,” and then they were transferring me from a wheelchair to my mom’s car. It was like no time passed between those two moments.