The horror of awakening during surgery

Boston.com / News / Boston Globe / Health / Science: "Seven years ago, Carol Weihrer, a flutist and office administrator, had her right eye removed. Weihrer had been living in pain from a severely scratched cornea for years and had undergone 17 surgeries to try to fix it. Just before she was given general anesthesia she remembers feeling relieved that her trauma would soon be over. Suddenly, she woke up hearing disco music and thinking, ''I must be done."

The next thing she said she heard was someone saying, '' 'Cut deeper. Pull harder.' . . . I realized: They are not done. They are just starting."

She felt no pain, but was absolutely terrified. ''I can remember praying to God, screaming, but no sound came out," said Weihrer, now 53, whose vocal muscles had been paralyzed by the anesthesia.

Such ''anesthesia awareness" is not as rare as one might think. An estimated one to two out of every 1,000 patients -- or 20,000 to 40,000 Americans a year -- wake up under general anesthesia, according to a large study by Emory University researchers published last year. (Patients given local or regional pain blocks plus ''conscious sedation" are not unconscious to begin with and therefore cannot have anesthesia awareness.) General anesthesia is a combination of several drugs, to block pain, paralyze the muscles so surgeons can cut tissue more easily, and to render patients unconscious and unable to remember the operation. The problem comes when patients regain consciousness while still paralyzed.

The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which accredits 85 percent of American hospitals, recently described the condition as ''under-recognized" and ''under treated" and said hospitals and doctors should develop policies for avoiding it. To this day, Weihrer, who now runs the Anesthesia Awareness Campaign Inc. from her home in Reston, Va., can't sleep lying down because it brings back too many vivid memories.

Like many patients who wake up during anesthesia, she is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, which includes flashbacks, irritability, and exaggerated startle responses. She can't sleep more than a few hours without nightmares and still can recall verbatim doctors' conversations in the operating room. ''Patients don't want to talk about it because they have a hard time believing it could happen to them, and anesthesiologists don't really want to acknowledge they have issues like that," said Dr. Michael England, senior anesthesiologist at New England Medical Center.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, both of which involve getting patients to imagine the trauma and learn to dampen their emotional arousal to it, can help overcome the trauma, Osterman said. To be sure, some cases of anesthesia awareness have been tough to avoid. If a patient already has low blood pressure, anesthesiologists deliberately keep the patient only lightly asleep so as not to depress blood pressure further. But often, anesthesia awareness is a genuine mistake that, until the last few years, doctors had no good way to detect -- though increases in heart rate and blood pressure, or leaking of tears from the eyes, are clues.

Now, some anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists use brain wave monitors such as the Bispectral Index, a system developed by Aspect Medical Systems in Newton, to gauge the patient's level of consciousness. Other companies, including Physiometrix in Billerica, also make brain activity monitors. Two studies published this year, one in Sweden and one in Australia, showed these monitors can reduce the incidence of awareness episodes."