Fear of going under...

Hello,

I have never been put to sleep for a surgery before. What is your experience?

I am scared I wont wake up or something.  I am not even sure how they will put me to sleep. I feel like I am some super natural  person that will feel the knife as they cut, while not being completely out of it

Someone please help!

I'm a nurse and I haven't worked in an OR for MANY years, but my son is an ER doc so we have lots of medical experience. Being put under is EASY now because they have so many cool short acting medications. They start an IV and put some medicine in there and that makes you float off to sleep almost immediately. If you start to wake up, they shoot more medicine in the IV. You are on a heart monitor and blood pressure monitor so they know if you are getting in trouble.

Once you are asleep, they can put a tube in your throat and control your breathing and give medication that way.

The medications they have these days are awesome and they clear out of your system pretty fast. We are very lucky to be having surgery now as opposed to 30 yrs ago. It's all monitored and the anesthesia meds are GOOD.

LOTS to worry about in life, but anesthesia is pretty far down my list. I have sleep apnea and an unusually large tongue (gross, I know...) and I do fine with anesthesia.

I've had 3 surgeries - 2 that I can recall. The 1st was as a kid, so I don't remember much about that.

The more recent one was an emergency umbilical hernia repair in 2001. I felt like I woke up very quickly, wasn't groggy and was all ready to walk out  - which I did a few hours later. I kinda liked the puffy boots that I was wearing when I woke up, as they were keeping my toes warm - LOL.

The previous operation was female parts surgery in the early 80's and I was kept fairly heavily sedated for 2 days. I suspect that was fairly standard practice at that time. My main memory is the catheter making me feel like I had to urinate and I mortified my mother by whining about "having to pee" whenever I'd wake up. Yo, Mom, at least I said "pee"!

So going under is not a fear of mine. From what RubyEllen says, I feel even better about it.

I have went under 3 times in the last 4 years. They usually give you medications through the IV that make you very, very sleepy and relaxed and kind of floaty. Then, they put an oxygen mask over your face, and fill it with some sort of gas, which makes you fall asleep, dreamless, and you wake up in recovery. Good luck :)