If you were in a car crash and had been eating all day, how is that different from a routine surgery where you weren’t allowed to eat for a certain amount of time before surgery?
Edit: based on some answers, perhaps I should clarify obviously I understand they have to perform surgery in an emergency. My question is more what do they do in an emergency when you haven’t fasted.
Thanks to those with real answers, I never knew about the special tube that could be used. That’s pretty cool.
I’m having surgery tomorrow and can’t eat so was just wondering how they handle food in the stomach during an emergency surgery situation.
In: 2585
Food in your stomach means you risk aspiration on induction of anaesthetic. Generally you fast for about 6 hours beforehand but really that’s an arbitrary number. Patients who have not eaten for days but are on lots of pain killers or have a bowel issue being operated on (or lots of other reasons) may still have a full stomach. We assess the risk of this and then decide how we will manage the airway.
Any emergency surgery where we don’t know if the patient has eaten or not we will assume the patient has a full stomach. In this case we would give rapid doses of anaesthetic and muscle relaxant and put a breathing tube in immediately without bag mask ventilating the patient. But this means everything has to happen rapidly with many team members involved, we risk being unable to get the tube in, and the rapid acting drugs can have unpleasant side effects. If the patient is fasted then we can do it in a more controlled slower way or we can use a different type of airway (e.g. laryngeal mask airway) which does not protect the vocal cords from vomit from the stomach. Much easier to use, less risk of damage to the teeth etc and muscle relaxant is not required to use these so often preferable.
It’s always a balance of risk, aspiration is overall quite rare.
– I’m an anaesthetist
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