I’ve heard of people under general anesthetic who become physically paralyzed but remain mentally alert. They feel the surgeon’s scalpel but are helpless and unable even to blink an eye or make a sound. Could you give me the straight dope on this phenomenon? –Pandora, via the Internet
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One patient in the UK required an operation that involved cutting open his leg and drilling into the bone. He was anesthetized but awoke in the operating room with a tube down his throat, aware but unable to move. He tried to alert the doctors by wiggling his toes; a nurse noticed this but was told it was “just reflexes” and she should ignore it. Someone then grabbed the patient’s leg and began applying a tourniquet to his groin, at which point he realized that (1) the operation was just beginning, (2) he was acutely sensitive to pain, and (3) he could do nothing about it. The patient had to lie there in helpless agony while his leg was sliced open and four holes were drilled into the bone. He felt sick and stopped breathing in another attempt to alert the OR staff, but the ventilator began “breathing for him.” Afterward he sued and was awarded £15,000, pretty modest compensation under the circumstances.
A woman having a cesarean section awoke on the operating table, alert but paralyzed. Initially she felt nothing, but eventually the painkiller wore off and the rest of the operation was a nightmare. “The nearest comparison would be the pain of a tooth drilled without local anesthetic–when the drill hits a nerve,” she wrote later. “Multiply this pain so that the area involved would equal a thumbprint, then pour a steady stream of molten lead into it.” Yikes.
