>> You will pass out in 15 seconds no matter how calm you are.
Well, I certainly didn't. In training (military) I did a pressure chamber day with 33,000ft breathing (lots of fun, do it if you ever get the chance). They took us to 12,000 in a big chamber and then fed us a reduced oxygen via masks to simulate 33,000ft. After about a minute I certainly felt effects, but I was very much awake long long after 15 seconds. I was playing solitaire on an iPad thing. After everyone noticed their personal symptoms they switched us over to pure O2. Some experienced tunnel vision and such. All I ever felt was as slight headache and that I was doing worse at the ipad game. I was awake enough to remember the Sargent who walked up and down the chamber looking us in the eye to see if we were awake. He was scary.
> When it works, you go from awake to awake again in an instant
That's my thought as well. Last time I was put under anesthesia I tried hard to think about how I was feeling. I went from awake with my eyes open to opening my eyes. I thought my eyes were already open? There is just literally nothing between that span of time.
It's like that except you don't wake? But it lasted an instant. How can something that passes in an instant last for infinity? It makes my brain hurt.
My experience with general anaesthesia was exactly like that. I was talking about bikes with the surgeon. 0 nanoseconds elapse. I'm waking up in another room.
> If you’ve ever awoken from general anesthesia, you know what death will be like
[citation needed]
I used to have a severe drug and alcohol problem. I once drank a bunch of beers and took 3 or 4 times the recommended dose of Ativan. I woke up 24 hours later from a blackout and discovered in that time I had walked to the store and bought more beer and some snacks. I had absolutely no memory of it.
So I'm going to say anesthesia is not like being dead. It's more like switching the memory recorder off.
> Upon removal of ventilator support, two of the patients showed an increase in heart rate along with a surge of gamma wave activity, considered the fastest brain activity and associated with consciousness.
Well yeah because they were conscious and knew you were going to kill them
This tracks with what comatose people that escaped a vegetative and indiscernible brain activity state have said on their own
> No gap, no memory of going under or anything that happened in between. It's like the intervening time didn't happen.
I had the same experience 2 weeks ago when being put under with propofol.
They asked me to hold a mask against my face and to start counting and then that's it, I woke up in recovery.
It was like I blinked and the whole thing was over.
Did not feel anything 'coming on' or like I was loosing consciousness, I was fully conscious and aware of all my surroundings, and then, bang, was in recovery.
> General anaesthesia and the idea you are actually awake but forget
Do you mean that this happens for some people? For me, GA felt like a very deep dream where I didn't notice falling asleep but I definitely remember what I dreamed.
> It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body
I always found it even more interesting how your body can switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try holding your breath for example—do it too long, and your body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a working state before attempting a new deployment.
Since there are few comments let me start off with perhaps an unusual anecdote.
I have seen hypoxia (as in insufficient oxygen) with people who do the Wim Hof Method (a breathing technique to keep you from freezing to death).
It’s very disconcerting to see as the people practicing it black out and are irresponsive. Luckily, there was doctor supervision and they rushed with oxygen masks to the persons with insufficient oxygen whenever it happened as this was a medical experiment.
It took about 2 minutes for some to be conscious again and respond to: what’s your name?
My own experience was a blackout for 10 seconds and I was watching at a stopwatch at the time and I remember seeing the 10 immediately change to a 20, followed with the question: what’s your name Melvin? Apparently they asked me that from 11 to 20.
I expect it is similar to loss of consciousness from anesthetic, like propofol: a few seconds of fading awareness followed by nothingness. The difference is you don't wake up and marvel at not remembering anything while under the effect of anesthetic.
>These people normally cannot come back to life from anesthesia, which is just making someone dead by stopping heartbeat and respiratory functions with anesthetic agents and then animating them with machines.
Hearts do not stop beating during ordinary general anaesthesia.
Ah, that brings back memories. That was the exact stuff we did, except that my exercises was to count backwards from 1000 by 13's.
We were told that we could possibly make it 3 to 4 minutes at FL250 before having to go back onto oxygen. I managed to get to 5 minutes, but was was pretty much useless after the 3rd minute. I started to feel a real out of body experience, and it was like I was watching my own body do stuff but I couldn't really control it. I managed to get my own mask on and gangload the 3 switches, but I remember watching my colleagues in the chamber struggle and they had to be assisted by the RAAF team. The guys outside the chamber kept a hawk eye watch on all of us, and the guy in the chamber were quick to assist those of us who were in trouble.
What amazed me was as soon as we 'gangloaded' the switches to go back on full O2 with the masks on, recovery to full lucidity was super quick - within 1 or 2 seconds. It wasn't gradual, it was as if someone just whipped a heavy blanket off your brain!
Side story - before we went into the chamber, we had to be fitted for our helmets and masks, and I was seated in the 'fitting chair' in the crew room as 3 RAAF specialists slapped a bone dome and mask on me. Unbeknownst to them, that mask had just come back from a test facility, and thus it still had the wax seal on the end of the O2 hose to the mask.
Normally, there is no seal, so when the mask is clipped on during a test, you can still breathe normally as the valve at the open end just opens and shuts with your lung pressure. With the wax seal on it though, NO air gets through.
It was a few seconds of odd feeling when they snapped the mask on and I tried to breathe in but nothing happened. I remember feeling really freaked out at the sensation of wanting to breathe, but feeling and experiencing absolutely nothing. I started to grapple with the mask release, but they thought I was just uncomfortable with the fit and they kept slapping my hands away and adjusting the side straps.
I went into panic mode, and I am not sure what prompted me, but I started reeling in the trailing hose from my mask and lifted it up to see the seal on the end. One of the crew saw it and exclaimed before grabbing the hose and ripping the seal off. I gulped down lungfuls of air. Not the best start to my first chamber session!
This one is actually a little different. There is much much less activity under anesthetic vs sleeping. There are even theories that going under general anesthetic actually causes some small degree of brain damage due to the shutdown.
“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says
Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness
soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I
ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like
everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It
didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions
going on.”
I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite experience in the ER one night.
I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER.
We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc.
So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing.
I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better.
I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments.
Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something.
After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.
> Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because your short term memory has been disabled.
I don't find this convincing. If you asked someone under such anesthesia if they were currently conscious, they'd probably say "yes". Doesn't it seem more likely that you just don't remember having been conscious? If I magically wiped away a year's worth of your memory, does that retroactively mean you had actually been unconscious during that year?
> There's no way to determine if your consciousness persists through sleep or unconsciousness.
If I remember correctly, that was actually the reason that anesthetics weren't used in operations for a time after their discovery - people believed that if you were out your soul would leave your body. Luckily, we've gotten over that particular idea.
> According to the complaints of a survivor, the medical graduate student (24 years old) from Wuhan University, she must stay awake and breathe consciously and actively during the intensive care. She said that if she fell asleep, she might die because she had lost her natural breath
Well, I certainly didn't. In training (military) I did a pressure chamber day with 33,000ft breathing (lots of fun, do it if you ever get the chance). They took us to 12,000 in a big chamber and then fed us a reduced oxygen via masks to simulate 33,000ft. After about a minute I certainly felt effects, but I was very much awake long long after 15 seconds. I was playing solitaire on an iPad thing. After everyone noticed their personal symptoms they switched us over to pure O2. Some experienced tunnel vision and such. All I ever felt was as slight headache and that I was doing worse at the ipad game. I was awake enough to remember the Sargent who walked up and down the chamber looking us in the eye to see if we were awake. He was scary.
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