One second, you're out cold.
The next you're on the operating table
in the middle of heart surgery.
Welcome
to your most terrifying nightmare.
For 170 years,
anesthesia has enabled
countless life-saving surgeries
without pain.
Before that,
your surgeon would give you
numbing agents like alcohol or opium.
They weren't as effective, of course.
“Thanks, I needed that.”
There are four main types of anesthesia.
Regional and local anesthetics
numb parts of your body.
But you remain conscious and aware.
The other types are sedation
and general anesthesia.
These are used in operations
with different levels of invasiveness,
from a routine colonoscopy
to a quadruple bypass.
They render you completely unconscious.
But sometimes things go sideways.
And now you're in the middle of a highly invasive heart operation,
about to wake up
to your own horror movie.
At first, your eyes wouldn't be fully open.
But you'd hear all the noises around you.
Doctors talking, equipment beeping
and your thoughts getting louder in your head.
As you gain more consciousness,
the bright lights above you would be blinding.
And you would become aware of the tube in your mouth
connected to a ventilator.
Naturally, you'd be confused and a bit dazed.
You might think the surgery was over.
But as you lower your eyes to your chest,
you would see the doctor cleaning your skin.
They are about to make the first incision.
You’d start to panic and try to sit up,
but you wouldn't be able to lift a finger.
It would feel as if someone was holding you down.
What you'd be experiencing is anesthesia awareness.
That's when you wake up during surgery.
And with your complex heart surgery lasting three to six hours,
get ready for an excruciating time.
The doctors would cut straight down the center of your chest wall.
And just as in your worst fears,
you'd feel everything.
Intense pain would tear through your body.
You'd try to scream, but you wouldn't be able to.
Maybe you could twitch your leg.
But the doctors would assume that
this was a muscle contraction,
and they'd hold it down.
Your heart rate wouldn't increase because your heart isn't beating.
A heart-lung bypass machine
is moving the blood away from your heart.
Now, they’d cut into your breast bone
and open up your rib cage.
The pain would be so intense that
"I am in pain."
you'd momentarily dip back out of consciousness.
When you wake back up
after only a few seconds,
you'd feel like you're suffocating.
The ventilator is pumping your lungs artificially.
No matter how much stress or anxiety you feel,
your body isn't in control.
This happened in one case of a woman who woke up during abdominal surgery.
Her general anesthesia wore off,
but she remained somewhat paralyzed.
This led to her having
an out-of-body experience.
This would be the best case scenario for you too.
The sounds of the operating room would drift away.
The pain and fear too.
For a moment, you'd feel warm and safe.
Maybe you'd even feel the presence of something divine.
But all the pain could come spiraling back.
And after all that stress and trauma,
you could experience a heart attack.
Now your life would be on the line.
Lucky for you,
the doctors would stabilize you.
Your surgeon would successfully bypass
the blocked artery in your heart.
Finally, this nightmare of a surgery would be over.
But the entire experience
wouldn't be something you could walk away from.
You could develop post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety.
Maybe even a phobia
of lying down flat on a bed.
Many things would suddenly bring back painful memories.
Thankfully, anesthesia awareness
only affects about one in 19,000 individuals.
And for most of those impacted,
it's not painfully traumatic
as you just experienced in our hypothetical scenario.
Besides, waking up
could just be better than the alternative.
Slipping into a deep coma.
But that’s a story for another WHAT IF.