10. The Distress Of Waking Up Under Anesthesia

            A woman named Sandra, who despite being on anesthesia was conscious during an orthodontic operation, wrote a foreward to The Royal College of Anaesthetists’ and the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland’s new report. The largest survey of “accidental awareness during anesthesia” (AAGA) resulted from four years of research in hospitals of the U.K. and Ireland and 300 anecdotal reports. In the introduction, the editors explain usually when faced with AAGA, people usually don’t believe it because anesthesia and human consciousness are not very well understood. The project was made to understand how and when AAGA happens. Reports show it happens about one time in every 19,000 surgeries using anesthesia. The report shows a majority of AAGA instances only last around 5 minutes, and only 18% of people said they felt pain. Other information they found was that 42% of people said they couldn’t move, 37% heard noises or voices, and 11% couldn’t breathe or felt suffocated. Half of the patients felt distressed, the other half was “neutral” (distress was more common among the patients who couldn’t move). Half all patients who had AADA suffered some type of long-term effect. People who had post-traumatic stress disorders because of it could either be troubled for a few weeks, many years, or maybe their whole lives. They also found that 85% of people who had it told others about it but only 50% told the hospital staff, and when they told people, of the people who told hospital staff, 1/3 were ignored or simply not believed. The report recommends support from physicians and other healthcare workers when a patient reports an experience like this. Sadly, only 12 out of 360 U.K. hospitals surveyed protocols for dealing with this issue. In her foreward, Sandra wrote that the hospital did not apologize at the time for what happened, but this NAP5 Report goes a long way to make up for lack of apologies.

            Julie Beck, a senior associate editor for The Atlantic, wrote this article. It is mostly informative, used to transmit information from a study, but it also includes her insight on it. She speaks of movies (2007 film Awake) and how it includes a setting similar to what the research talks about. She cleverly wrote that as a hook so the reader could connect what is happening to something they already saw, making it more enjoyable and a little easier to understand. She includes various specific data information and links to the official report, to show the information comes from a reliable source. The author was successful in explaining the information in a simple way for the reader to easily understand what the report means.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-distress-of-waking-up-under-anesthesia/380538/