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.
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.
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.
They don’t always do this, correct?
I’ve under brief general anesthesia and was given oxygen, but never was put on a breathing tube. I think I was given thiopental and Sux.
They don’t always do this, correct?
I’ve under brief general anesthesia and was given oxygen, but never was put on a breathing tube. I think I was given thiopental and Sux.
They don’t always do this, correct?
I’ve under brief general anesthesia and was given oxygen, but never was put on a breathing tube. I think I was given thiopental and Sux.
>one of my fear has always been to wake up with a metal tube down my throat
Well you can cross off this fear. They use a plastic/rubber tube.
>one of my fear has always been to wake up with a metal tube down my throat
Well you can cross off this fear. They use a plastic/rubber tube.
>one of my fear has always been to wake up with a metal tube down my throat
Well you can cross off this fear. They use a plastic/rubber tube.
anesthesia, to achieve its desired effect of extreme decreased perception of pain also has a capability to decreased respiration or block your airways (think like sleep apnea). So in the middle of surgery, while the docs are busy slicing and dicing, someone has to make sure that you’re still breathing and the best way to do that is to secure the airways by bypassing your vocal chords and have a direct access to your lungs where they can deliver oxygen.
Now how do we know when you are ready. The ventilator or the machine that breathes for you has settings that can mimic atmospheric environment and we have numbers that we look at to measure your own capability to pull air, how much, and how well, very very simply put. We match your ability with said environmental settings and run the ventilator on sort of a stand by/idle settings where it will let you breath on your own under environmental conditions but will revert back on auto in an event where you do stop breathing (this means it’s currently unsafe to remove the tube, because why remove it when you’re obviously going to stop breathing again right?). This method is a rough draft of what it would look like if you were extubated.
In extreme cases, we can measure your blood to see if oxygen transfers properly and is a tell tale sign if we can remove the tube successfully or not.
Source: I help tube people
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