I’m going under general for the first time in two weeks for a brain biopsy.
Explain it and how it’s safe.
I’m not scared of the biopsy, just the general.
Is that normal?
In: 90
Anesthesia resident physician here.
Your brain has On and Off signals (or wake and sleep) firing at all times. When you’re doing your normal daytime stuff, it’s like 90% On signals, 10% Off signals. When you sleep, it’s flipped.
What we do for anesthesia is use medications that tell your brain to fire more and more Off signals until you’re fully anesthetized. These medications keep making the brain fire Off signals to override the On signals generated by surgeons/proceduralists poking you. Then we help out by managing any other bodily functions that also got turned off by our ramping up the Off signals (breathing, regulating temperature, etc).
When the surgeons are done, we turn off the medications and slowly the On signals again outnumber the Off signals in your brain and you wake up!
But yes, be honest and thorough when answering the anesthesiologist’s questions pre op. We need to know what your body looks like a baseline so we know how best to manage it when it needs the help.
Happy to answer questions. 🙂
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