Anesthesia Awareness Essays - Medicine, Pain, Anesthesia

Anesthesia Awareness Essays - Medicine, Pain, Anesthesia Anesthesia Awareness Anesthesia is used during surgery to put people to sleep so that they don't feel immense pain, instead they sleep for the entire operation which makes the surgeons job quicker and more effective compared to operating on a living patient going through severe pain and probably moving the whole time making it a lot easier for the doctors to make a mistake that could be life altering. But in some cases patients who are under anesthesia are able to wake up during their operation "which doctors call anesthesia awareness." This situation is rare and refers to when patients can remember where they are and pressure or pain, that occurred to them during their surgery while they were meant to be under anesthesia. And so the patient wakes up paralysed because they are not fully asleep, and because of this they could be screaking and no one would be able to hear them, only after the operation would people become aware of what happened and know that for the duration of the surgery this patient was able to feel everything that was happening to them and had no chance of getting them to stop. Before the operation doctors tell their patients that they will be put to sleep for the duration of the surgery as it ensures that they don't feel any pain. But this is not the case and what they are actually doing is putting the person in a reversible coma so they have no memory of what went on in the operation and the pain they would have experienced. Today doctors use machines that monitor the patient's brain activity that allows them to see if the person wakes up so that they can reduce them from experiencing this extra pain, but this is not always recognised and some people still wake up and have to endure this pain.