General Anesthesia Has Greatly Improved Since I Had my Tonsils Removed

Boy, has general anesthesia made some leaps and bounds in the last 44 years! I was expecting the same sort of scary experience I'd had when my tonsils were removed when I was six years old.

I remember so clearly how I saw the doctors surrounded me in the operating room, I seemed to be seeing them through viscous water. They told me to count backwards, and I began falling in a spiral down a long, dark tunnel. Creepy!

Well, that isn't how it happens today. I was wheeled into the pre-op room, and something must have been put into my IV. I fell asleep without any of the foreplay that usually accompanies sleep--no strange, dissociate thoughts and images, no feeling of drifting. No, it was simply lights out.

I awoke two and a half hours later, wondering when we were going to get this show on the road. Then my right hand rested on my abdomen, and I felt the catheter. The operation was over!

I had no recollection of being wheeled into surgery. I never saw the operating room or the surgeon or the surgical nurses. I had no sensation of the tube being put down my throat (though currently I have a sore throat). And to really confuse me, they put me back in the same bed slot in the pre-op room, which also must be the post-op room.

When people have an alien abduction is must be something like this. You go to sleep in one spot, you have a bunch of missing time and evidence that something was done to you, and then you're dropped back into your normal life.

I'm certainly NOT complaining, as this was a vastly better experience than the tonsil one. It's just that it was totally unexpected.