Waking Up During Surgery: Nightmare or Reality?

It doesnt happen often, but a new study shows that when patients find themselves awake during surgery, pain is not the worst part:

Pain was something they understood, but very few of us have experienced what its like to be paralyzed, lead author Jaideep Pandit of Oxford University Hospitals told New Scientist. They thought they had been buried alive.

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Drugs given to relax muscles account for the feeling of paralysis.

I thought I was about to die, said a patient who woke up during a dental operation when she was 12 years old, according to New Scientist. It felt as though nothing would ever work again as though the anesthetist had removed everything apart from my soul.

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The good news is that the new research shows the phenomenon is lower than previous studies indicated: about 1 in 19,000 patients who get general anesthesia report waking up, usually before or after the actual surgery. The new study analyzed 300 cases in 2012 in the UK and Ireland by asking an anesthetist at every hospital to record every incident in which a patient told someone they had been awake during surgery.

But John Andrzejowski, an anesthetist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, told New Scientist that this latest audit probably missed some cases. The true figure is probably somewhere in the middle, he said.

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The researchers recommend giving patients smaller doses of anesthesia so they can communicate enough to inform the surgical team if they do wake up.

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Waking Up During Surgery: Nightmare or Reality?