The phrase ‘put to sleep’ is often used when giving someone general anesthetic, but it’s not actually accurate.
An anesthesiologist has revealed what really happens when you have major surgery, and it’s quite a scary thought.
The truth about general anesthetic
Most people assume being under general anesthetic means you are asleep and the pain is numbed, but you aren’t actually sleeping at all.
“Anaesthesia is not sleep,” Anthony Kaveh said on TikTok. “We give you medication that turns off your brain, making you completely unconscious so you can’t perceive pain.”
They also give other medications that paralyze your body and wipe your memory, so you don’t remember the surgery when you ‘wake up’. So, general anesthetic doesn’t just send you to sleep, it switches off your entire brain, essentially putting you into a coma-like state.
You don’t dream or think about anything. The world just stops for the surgery length, and you wake up feeling like nothing happened. However, if a lower dose of anesthetic is used and you are in a lighter state of sedation, you may dream.
“General anesthesia is a state of controlled unconsciousness,” the NHS explains. “All anaesthetics stop the nerves from passing signals to the brain. This means you do not feel anything.”
You are completely unaware of your environment and surroundings under general anesthesia – unless things go wrong that is.
You can wake up during surgery
To make things even scarier, people can sometimes wake up during surgery, and it’s called Anesthesia Awareness. According to the American Society of Anesthesiologists, this happens in around one or two out of every 1,000 medical procedures involving general anesthesia.
The patient can recall their surroundings, or an event related to the surgery. It can be upsetting, but patients usually do not feel any pain as the body is still numbed, your brain just switches back on.
Some people have brief, vague recollections while others are more specific. In some cases, people report feeling pressure in the surgery area. This usually happens in surgeries where the usual dose of required anesthesia cannot be used safely, like c-sections, heart surgery and after a traumatic injury.
‘The closest feeling to being dead’
In the comments, one person described the state of unconsciousness you are in under general anesthesia as “the closest thing to being dad” – and that’s actually true.
“Near-death experiences happen on operating tables like this every day, but patients don’t remember what’s happening because we wipe their memories with anesthetics,” Kaveh replied.
So, they can’t tell us what it was like to be “all the way at the edge”. What a scary thought!
Dr. Anthony Kaveh is an anesthesiologist and integrative medicine specialist who completed his medical degree at Stanford University School of Medicine and anesthesiology residency at Harvard Medical School.
