Anesthesia Awareness

Dec. 9 - I'm thinking to myself, there's no way in the world I'm going to survive this, I will die. This is it". Carol Weihrer of northern Virginia recalls her nightmare that unfolded 6 years ago. During surgery to remove her diseased right eye, something terrible happened. She woke up.

"I was thinking clearly as I'm talking to you now. I heard the surgeon say to the resident, "cut deeper, pull harder." I saw them clip the optic nerve, everything went black."

Even though she knew what was happening, there was nothing she could do to stop it because she had been given general anesthesia that included a drug that left her temporarily paralyzed and powerless.

"I was screaming at the top of my lungs, but I knew no sound was coming out."

Anesthesia awareness happens when a patient isn't given enough anesthesia. It's more likely in some cases, such as traumas, open heart surgery, and emergency cesarean sections, when it's too dangerous to give patients high doses of anesthesia.

It's estimated that 20-to-40,000 patients experience anesthesia awareness every year. That's actually pretty rare when you consider that 21-million people have general anesthesia every year.

Still, the group that accredits the nation's hospitals says awareness is "under recognized and under treated." And it wants that to change.

In an alert the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations called on hospitals to educate both the staff and the patients about anestheisa awareness, and if a patient should wake up during surgery, to provide counseling.

Dr. John Dombrowski, anesthesiologist said, "We as anesthesiologists, the first thing we want to do is prevent awareness."

And anesthesiologists do that by monitoring the amount of medicine being given to a patient, by checking vital signs, and in some cases, using a machine that measures brain activity.

Anesthesiologists are also looking for new ways to keep patients from waking up during surgery. "We think there are a lot of new technologies out here and we embrace them, but we want to embrace them cautiously, after we have ferretted out in terms of the scientific method in terms of proving them correct or incorrect."

Carol Weiher filed a lawsuit after her operation. She settled the case and started a patient advocacy campaign to educate people about anesthesia awareness. "We don't speak to scare, we speak to spare."

You should talk to your doctor and anesthesiologist before your surgery and ask them about your risk and be honest with them about your medical history.