I’ve heard that if someone undergoes surgery and needs to be put under with general anesthesia, that the doctor will put a tube down your lungs to make sure you get enough oxygen.
So does this mean a person under general anesthesia is incapable of breathing on their own, or is it done as a safety measure?
Final question:
How do doctors know when to take the tube out before a patient wakes up? I’ve never been put under before, but one of my fear has always been to wake up with a metal tube down my throat and get that Matrix Neo experience when he first wakes up in the pod and pulls a giant tube from his throat.
Does this ever happen? How is it prevented?
In: 197
I’m an anaesthetist.
The drugs that make you unconscious also tend to make you stop breathing, particularly if we need to paralyse your muscles, which we often do for various reasons. Additionally you can’t cough or clear secretions or maintain the tone in your airway muscles that you need to keep the airway open. So we have to find a way of getting oxygen into your lungs. The breathing tube (technically called an endotracheal tube, and it’s made of plastic, not metal) is one way of doing that. It’s secure – ie it doesn’t fall out easily, it blocks stuff like excess saliva and vomit from entering the lungs and causing infection (there’s a little cuff on the end of it that we can inflate to block anything going around the outside of the tube) and it allows us to ventilate hard without a leak when we need to.
We take it out (called extubation) at the end of the case as the patient is waking up. The idea is to extubate at the point where the patient is awake enough to not need it but not awake enough that they remember it. Patients very rarely tell me that they remember the tube and if they do they don’t really care.
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