Anaesthesia by Kate Cole-Adams

Author:Kate Cole-Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2017-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

These days anaesthetic drugs are administered in combinations and quantities that ensure experiences such as James’s are rarely if ever reported in the anaesthetic literature—although if you search ‘laughing gas’ on YouTube you will find plenty of very high dental patients.

But hallucinations after surgery, sometimes benign, sometimes terrifying, are remarkably common, particularly in older patients. My former French lecturer Colin Nettelbeck told me shortly after he retired about the day, several years before, when he nearly died of meningococcal disease. He fell ill just after dinner and deteriorated rapidly. By the time he got to hospital next morning he needed a wheelchair. He recalls a doctor asking his name; his own unsuccessful attempt to reply; the aching head—‘Almost as if it had been laminated into different layers of pain.’ He woke the next day in intensive care with a tube down his windpipe.

A few days later, in another section of the hospital, he became delirious. In this peculiar state, he felt vividly that he was doing battle with weird humanoid figures, and that he was losing strength. (‘The space was how you might imagine Dante’s circles of hell.’) In another scenario he was on a beach defending a family who were being attacked by hoons with baseball bats. ‘My own weapon was a pickaxe.’ The dream/visions morphed, mutated and sometimes repeated. ‘I’m wearing my long blue London Fog raincoat and I’m on the beach…and I’m very, very tired. I can barely walk…I’m looking for help from the people around me but they’re all terribly feral and ugly people. They’re looking at me scornfully.’

The causes of such hallucinations are unclear. Some researchers point to an inflammatory response that can affect the brain, particularly in older and less robust surgical patients. But while anaesthetic and pain drugs are among the likely triggers, the experiences seem to involve a melding of circumstances that surround our experience of surgery: events in the recovery room; our level of pain and anxiety; interactions with staff; as well as whatever it is we bring with us, the prisms and perspectives through which we experience our own worlds. It is a process that involves both the medical procedure and the person to whom the procedure is happening. The lines are blurred.

Which brings us back in a roundabout way to Rachel Benmayor, the woman who woke on the operating table feeling her child being cut out of her but unable to call for help. What happened to Rachel that day—the consciousness, the paralysis, the terrible pain—was just the beginning.

And then I realised that I was in a really amazing place. And I realised that I was very close to dying.

It was at this point that she shouldered through the flimsy threshold that marks the furthest reaches of science, and entered another realm altogether. I have no idea what to make of her experience. I can only tell you what she told me. Her story is neither reliable nor valid nor repeatable. Here, while she could still feel everything happening in her body, she was also distracted from it.

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