As a compliment to the thread about near death experiences I’d really like hearing people’s experiences of losing consciousness under general anesthesia and what’s it like coming back.
Also interested of things anesthetists may have noticed about this during their career.
Life just stops. It’s like there was a portion deleted from your living record. No thoughts. No dreams. No fuzzy memories at the edge of thought that you can’t quite recall. None of that stuff you get even when blackout drunk. One moment you’re alive, counting or talking to the nurse, then suddenly you’re back and someone’s removed a piece of your body and apparently a piece of your timeline.
This is the correct answer. It’s a complete lack of experiencing anything. Not black, not darkness, but simply nothing. Before the general anesthesia you’ll feel high, and when you’re coming out of the general anesthesia you’ll be groggier than you’ve ever been in your life, but the time during general anesthesia simply won’t exist for you.
It’s the experience of death. Life is going on, time is passing, but your consciousness is not part of it.
I just talked about this on other thread but I find the non-experience of general anesthesia to be quite comforting in two ways.
Assuming that from the first person perspective it’s indistinguishable from death then it confirms that death is not just some kind of positive non-existence. You’re not left floating in a black void. It’s not that there’s a gap in the movie that’s just a blank screen. That entire section is removed. You go from one moment to another entirely skipping what happened inbetween. From first person perspective that gap doesn’t exist. You never really went unconsciouss. You went from experiencing the drugs starting to take effect to waking up. Death is probably just like this except that there’s no jump from experience to another but experience just stops.
The another thing about this is that maybe death doesn’t stop experience. Since you cannot experience not existing then maybe death is no different from general anesthesia; you die here and then in an instant you’re (what ever that is) transported having some other experience somewhere else in a different body or into whatever that can have experiences. Perhaps this is what people mean by rebirth.
I like this perspective, I think I will adopt it.
A slightly related thought. I personally find experience/perspective/consciousness itself to be of utmost absurdity. I don’t find indefinite consciousness via some method I don’t understand to be any more absurd.
“What is consciousness?” That is the one question I want to know the answer to the most. I’m sorry cancer patients but if I get to meet an oracle and get to ask one thing that’s what I’m going to ask.
I don’t even so much care about how it emerges or what are the requirements needed for it to emerge. That is the “easy” problem. What I’m truly curious about is what it is. How can it be that materia gives rise to subjective experience. It’s weird! It’s something so fundamental yet if you weren’t experiencing it yourself you’d have no idea it’s even a thing. There’s zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Also as Sam Harris says it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
It’s weird! It’s something so fundamental yet if you weren’t experiencing it yourself you’d have no idea it’s even a thing. There’s zero evidence for it outside of the mind itself.
Just a random thought, this reminds me of light. Kinda weird to think about but light is invisible unless it goes directly into your eyes.
Also as Sam Harris says it’s the only thing in the entire universe that cannot be an illusion. Even if everything else is fake and the entire universe is just a hallucination/simulation the fact that it feels like something to be in that simulation is still true.
Very very strange.
This and time too. You ask the oracle about consciousness, I’ll ask about time lol.
“I think therefore I am” … does that also mean “I thought therefore I was”? or something like that?
“I think therefore I am” … does that also mean “I thought therefore I was”? or something like that?
No, theoretically your whole memory could be an illusion.
Now assume I’m the oracle.
Time is the passage of the story that you are/exist in.
In some more general sense, the universe doesn’t so much exist as a physical, real world, but as a story, dream or thought. In that story, you move forward like water flows in a river. That way you experience the passage of time. The landscape already exists, only you get to see it bit by bit. You’re welcome.
So like am I the only one[tm] who felt like time did pass, actually, while I was under? It was like being deeply asleep.
Oh god the grogginess. One of the worst feelings
IMO it’s not a big deal as long as you know to expect it. If you know about it then you won’t be fighting crazy hard against it and thinking that something is wrong with you that you can’t make yourself fully awake. If you know about it before it happens then you know to not fight it, just relax and wait for the drugs to wear out of your system. They really should tell patients to expect the grogginess right before they’re put under.
Great description. It’s exactly like being dead. Absolutely nothing at all. It actually helped me get over my fear of death.
Except it’s fucking terrifying
It’s not. If you don’t wake up from it you’ll never even know or care. So who cares?
So instead of being scared of dying, the terror comes from being dead.
I’m not scared of being dead, it’s like before you were born, you wouldn’t even know.
I’m scared of dying a slow death. Like buried alive, or with a broken body in a hospital bed. Instant death? I don’t care.
Exactly. I wanted to sing a song and finish it when waking up. I wasted my time for asking if that’s the gas putting me down. Brain fuzzing and boom. Darkness and singing the song. Can barely remember. A nurse one day later asked me what song I sang.
It’s really like a piece is missing, you are aware but the feeling is like nothing happened.
Yes, a few times. Each time I went from feeling awake and alert to suddenly being somewhere else and feeling groggy and hungry. Nothing strange otherwise.
Yeah exactly that. Anesthesiaologost said countdown from 10, got to seven both times them woke up hours later back in the ward.
I remember being a cheeky kid at the time and asking “what if I hit zero?”, the anesthesiologist told me “okay, count from 100”… Yeah I didn’t make it past 97…
I didn’t even began to count! I was asking what kind of drug they were using, I remember the nurse saying it was not opioid and then black! The strangest thing for me is that you fall asleep suddenly and abruptly so is different from a normal sleep
When I woke up I was like “oh I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep.” The nurse just laughed then it hit me, I was supposed to fall asleep. Lol
The profound nothingness is almost hard to believe. I’m not talking an empty sleep—I mean it feels like someone cut a segment out of the film strip of your life.
The first time I was fully knocked out like that was for tooth surgery, and I thought the doctor was messing with me when he said they were done already—from my perspective I had barely closed my eyes for a moment. Sure enough, there was gauze in my mouth and the sun was setting outside. It had been over 90 minutes, and I didn’t even feel like I’d slept.
Same for me. I remember starting to count down from 10 and feeling intensely sleepy, and then waking up on the bed asking when they were going to start the surgery and the nurse was like, lol, that happened a while ago mate. So weird.
Wisdoms? Same experience for me. My partner was in the room with a nurse asking me about my pain level. At first I was confused, what pain? Then as consciousness properly barrelled in I managed to sob an ‘8’ through the gauze. I preferred oblivion at that point - they had to take a big chunk of bone and boy did I know it at that moment
I’m kind of sad that I never got to experience that, to be honest. I only had two wisdom teeth- 1 on the top left and 1 on the bottom right. The right was set to be impacted, but apparently it hadn’t grown any roots, yet (I was 17 or 18) so they decided it just get it out with a local. It was… unpleasant. The top left one has never come through, either, so I may well not have bothered 😓
Haha don’t have FOMO for surgery, mate. A life lived without it is a good one.
They can still wreak havoc on your teeth even if they don’t come down. They tend to migrate and move and that can mess up your bite. So not likely now presuming you’re older but it’s a chance when you’re younger and still growing etc.
Yeah I’m 30, now. I presume they’re just chilling, lol. Has anyone’s come down after that point, do you think?
Not that I saw when I worked there. My impacted wisdoms only became an issue in my 30s though, so who knows?!
It’s so weird to me that you’re all put under for wisdom teeth. I’ve had three out with local and nobody even suggested I might need a general.
Was a dental nurse once upon a time. Assisted with many an extraction. Yes if conditions are good (the jaw is large, the tooth is straight, there’s no tangling or bone issues) then not a problem. But I did not enjoy putting some people with poor neck strength in headlocks. Or the post extraction vomiting. Or the way the patient cringed as they heard the tooth snap in their skull. Or the complete look of trauma on their face after.
Just because they couldn’t feel pain didn’t mean the experience wasn’t harrowing. I needed to go under because all 4 were badly impacted. But having insider knowledge on the process, I would’ve chosen to be knocked out regardless.
To me it felt like THE BEST dreamless nap.
Did you feel rested afterwards?
They told me they were starting to put me to sleep (can’t remember the exact words), and I must have gone under before they finished the sentence. Next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery ward, feeling completely at peace. The most peaceful I have ever felt in my life. I fell asleep again and woke up later in the same ward.
That Propofol and/or Fentanyl sleep is something else. For about a week after surgery I slept the most wonderful sleep.
I don’t recall any lasting sleep benefits, but you’re absolutely right that there ain’t NOTHIN like a Propofol nap. Amazing. And when I woke up, completely, instantly awake, no grogginess or hangover effect.
No wonder MJ was addicted.
I don’t know what they gave me. I don’t recall them ever telling me. I do know that my sleep for the next three weeks sucked due to pain, and an abscess that got a little bit out of control.
Instantaneous time warp. One moment, I’m relaxing on the table before the procedure. Next moment, I’m being told the procedure’s done.
It’s like a human
SIGSTOP, for all you programmers out there.Yeah they put the tube in and I woke up 6 hours later. I was literally turned off and on.
I was a kid when I last had it. Really uneventful. “Count backwards from 10” and you’re out by 6.
My wife had it a few months ago to fix a deviated septum. Her native language is Turkish. When she came to she was only speaking English. The doctors couldn’t understand her “but she seems fine.” I told her she was speaking Chinese just to fuck with her a bit. “Oh no! We need to get a dictionary!” It was really strange… She understood Turkish perfectly fine but was completely unable to speak it.
Other than some funny after effects, it was mostly a non-issue for her as well. She was fine after a couple hours.
I remember the „count backwards“ trick well. What a flex.
Nothing. You breathe twice, then blackout. You wake in a bedroom, feels like an unpleasant and quite huge hangover. Then, as the anesthesia fades away, you might feel the pain coming progressively (depending on what you have).
I’ve had one surgery in my teens. I was immediately knocked out, unconscious, no dreams that I can recall. When I woke up I was so groggy I couldn’t even really move for a while, everything just felt heavy. I would just kind of look around with my eyes and then close them to try to get more sleep.
Twice, for my wisdom teeth and my colonoscopy. The first time I didn’t feel anything and I was out as soon as he put the drug in the IV. I blinked and woke up in the waiting room afterwards. I was groggy and my cheeks were packed with gauze, but I was fine after that
For the colonoscopy I felt the slight chill in my veins, and it felt like I was giving into a very deep sleep that I really wanted. However I was exhausted from shitting my brains out the night before so I definitely did want to sleep lmao.
When I woke up I felt a little high and super well rested, it was great, like I had just smoked a small bowl. One thing they don’t tell you about colonoscopies until the day of is that they put air up there as the camera goes up so they can see inside more clearly, and you “expel” all that air when you wake up.
The nurse told me the procedure was finished as I came to and as I lay there high and half asleep, I RIP HUGE ASS. I’m holding in laughter like a little kid because fart jokes are still funny especially when I’m high lmao.
I get into the car and my gf has a sandwich waiting for me. I hadn’t eaten solid food in about 24 hours and I was still kind of high. Best fucking sandwich of my life.
Here they offer you CO2 instead of air. Gets mostly absorbed and much less farting.
what’s it like coming back.
Waking up and asking the same questions over and over. “It’s over?” “We’re done?” “It already happened?”
I remember thinking it’s taking surprisingly long for the gas over my mouth and nose to do anything. A pretty surgical assistant was staring at my eyes and talking to me calmly, saying I was doing great. And I was doing great. Then the next moment I was suddenly startled awake again as completely different people were shouting and holding my arms, trying to bring me back to consciousness as I was flailing around in confusion. Apparently the surgery went well.
Yes, just last month. It was my first time. It wasn’t a long procedure, took like 40 minutes ish. Anyway, I didn’t feel anything. I just remember them telling me that they’re gonna try to put me to sleep and that I should try to relax. Next I knew, I was waking up in recovery. I didn’t even have any idea that I was in recovery already unless I noticed that the surgical room was different.
It felt just like sleep, I didn’t even have any dizziness afterwards. When done properly, that’s how it should be.
Arm feels cold as it goes in, the feeling spreads, taste of copper in the mouth… wake up in recovery. Pretty straightforward.
I’ve had several surgeries. Two types of anaesthetic.
First was when I was 4 years old, in the 1980s. Was a gaseous anaesthetic, through a gas mask.
It was a kind of quasi-consciousness, not that I remember having trains of thought or self-actualization, but I remember there being a feeling of the passage of time. I remember seeing colors. No pain during the procedure.
Second type of anaesthetic was for my second and third surgeries (aged 13 and 17), a normal liquid, IV-administered anaesthetic. This one was just a complete knock out blank for me. No cognizance of anything. I was just out in one moment during the backward from 10 countdown, and aware again in the recovery room, in what felt like 3 to 5 seconds later (it was, of course, a couple of hours later).
This second type of anaesthetic had the interesting post-surgery side effect of continuing to knock me out (with no time passage perceived) for hours after the surgery. I would, in my perception, blink, and my visitors would suddenly warp across the room because my eyes hadn’t been shut for .1 second like it felt to me, but actually a couple of hours per occurrence, of dreamless, non-time-passing “sleep”. Not an experience I’d had before, or since. The last surgery (17) was a bit less disconcerting because I knew from the previous one (13) about the effect.
