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.
To me it felt like THE BEST dreamless nap.
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.
Quite often! Like everyone else has mentioned, one moment you’re in the OR, and then the next moment they’re waking you up and making sure you’re alright.
A lot of times they don’t even seem to ask me to count backwards anymore, I remember one time I asked if they wanted me to and they said “Nope, we’ve already started the meds so you should be asleep in a few seconds”, I remember getting very sleepy and saying something along the lines of “Oh, well that explains a lot” and then I was waking back up. There was a time where they did have me count backwards, and when I got to 80 they were quite confused - apparently my IV had an issue so I wasn’t actually getting the meds (they generally use propofol and a local anesthetic over here, the local one first since propofol can have a burning sensation). They fixed it quickly, had me restart the count, and I don’t even think I made it to 95 before being out.
I have never had any negative side effects from it thankfully, but I have noticed that the longer the procedure is, the more tired you feel after you come out of it. It’s common for me to fall back asleep after a 7 hour procedure, but for one that is an hour or less once they wake me up I’m generally awake for the rest of the day.
8 weeks ago, June 26. I remember getting ready, they put an IV in. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up. When I woke up I was shivering, but I wasn’t actually cold. They immediately gave me some cookies and water and 2 Oxycodone pills and I got dressed and my mother-in-law took me to her place where I was staying the night.
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.
Twice, and they were completely different experiences.
First was gas at the dentists for taking 3 teeth out as my mouth was overcrowded. I was kind of asleep, I could hear people’s voices in a really trippy flanged way, and I could vaguely feel some tugging at my jaw (but no pain). The gas tasted awful.
The second was for an operation at hospital after an accident (requiring 6.5 hours of microsurgery). It was like jumping forwards 7 hours in time, literally counting the seconds after the anaesthetic went in at night, then immediately waking up in broad daylight. It is completely unlike deep sleep (where you still are aware that time has passed).
Arm feels cold as it goes in, the feeling spreads, taste of copper in the mouth… wake up in recovery. Pretty straightforward.
I had a larger surgical procedure done when I was 7. They gave me the calming pre meds maybe half an hour before the operation to make sure that I wouldn’t freak out with the IV. I remember clearly how strange it felt when the pre meds started to kick in, the whole world slowed down and everything felt “good”.
Then they wheeled me into the OR and took my robe off. The operating table was cold and I commented on it, the anesthesia doctor just laughed and said “don’t worry, in a minute it won’t be”. Then she put the IV in and asked me to count down from twenty. “Nine” was the last word I managed to stutter before I went under.
Then I woke up in the recovery room, about 9 hours later. It felt like I had slept a really long, dreamless sleep. The operation had gone as planned, but the recovery period in the hospital was still pretty painful.
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.
what’s it like coming back.
Waking up and asking the same questions over and over. “It’s over?” “We’re done?” “It already happened?”
I honestly just felt like a sleept 3days in a row, Reality was like 5~8 hours
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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.
When I was little I had to get stitches in my ear so they had to put me under while they stitched the top of my ear back in place, all I remember is sitting down on the medical bed then all of a sudden it was done and we were leaving.
It varies depending on the drugs used, I’ve been under multiple times now, the big one being for an open heart bypass.
That one I saw nothing, felt nothing, but coming out of it I remember them pulling out the breathing tube and putting me on a bi-pap machine. I had to beg to be taken off of it because it was stopping me from exhaling. I could breathe in fine, but the back pressure wouldn’t let me breathe out.
Then the drugs, it was a combination of a bunch of things, propofol (the stuff that killed Michael Jackson), fentanyl (the stuff that killed Prince). Oxy, the works.
I was having weird hallucinations. If I closed my eyes, I could see a perfectly painted brick wall about a foot in front of my face. I could see the detail on the bricks and the mortar, the texture of the paint. Bonus - every time they put me in a different room, the wall would change color.
