It’s pretty clear to me many people here have never either had general anesthesia or talked to anyone who had, you can’t really time funny one-liners right before you pass out.
Here’s how it works:
They’ll put a mask with a rubber tube in your mouth for oxygen, and tell you to relax and count back from 10, so you start counting impatiently(it’s boring, and there is nothing else to do), wondering when the surgery is going to start.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Now the anesthesiologist is in front of you, checking on you to see if you’re OK. “But I haven’t finish counting down yet, when is the surgery going to start?” You ask them.
“It’s already over”, they explain.
Then you realize you are in a completely different room, the tube is no longer in your mouth, but you feel so weak you can hardly move, and the stitches/staples around your new surgery wound is starting to itch.
It’s like a segment of your life was cut out and erased into nothingness.
I’ve had many surgeries and most were exactly like this. One time, though, I remember counting down too 4 and then saying, “My ears are ringing.” The anesthesiologist said, “Is this better?” I said, “Yes,” and then woke up.
Proper explanation, indeed - you never get all the way through the countdown before you time travel. Beforehand, though (at least in my too many to count without it sounding like a weird brag experiences), the “last words” moment is before the mask, but after the pre-anesthesia. Depends on the procedure, and probably the person, too.
Depending on how consciousness actually works, the you before that might have died and you’re an entirely new consciousness with the same brain and memories.
While sleeping brain activity retains a natural patern and flow, no point in worrying about that since sleep is absolutely a necessity (and I love it). Anesthesia disrupts this brain activity and interrupts your mental existence.
I’ve had nearly a dozen surgeries, and none of them have gone like that.
Sometimes I have a mask over my face, but mostly I don’t, then they give me a little prick in my arm. I feel cold travel up my arm, whilst the person counts down from 10. When the cold gets to my shoulder, which is usually when the countdown is at about 7 or so, I go under, like someone turned off a light, but just slow enough that I can just remember an awareness of being about to go under. There’s no weakness, no feeling of being unable to move, just cold travelling up my arm, and then lights out.
Then, I wake up, with an awareness that time has passed, though not an awareness of how long it has been.
This is also exactly how I remember my only time under the knife. I remember feeling that cold in my veins and “this is it, I’m passing out any moment now”. Then I don’t remember anything until I was in the recovery section even though I regained conscience in the operating block as expected. I just remember waking up with the oxygen mask covering my mouth and feeling extremely claustrophobic.
Neat, that’s legitimately interesting! Maybe you have something unique in your physiology that gives you a different perspective? I’m pushing 6 surgeries under general, and around 5 precedures under IV, probably missing some numbers with my now shoddy memory forming capabilities, but my experiences with the knockout sedation could be described much more similarly to your experience, and a few of the IV sedations weren’t as deep, so I remember a bit more of the “in and out”, but mostly it’s just “Oh, yeah, I feel there’s a change in my coherence-BLACKOUT”, and then next awareness is recovery room beeps.
It’s interesting how different people respond. I remember changing into the tunic/robe, and then nothing. I don’t even remember leaving the pre-op room, just waking up in the post-op hallway in one of about 20 beds.
The last 2 times I went under (for a complicated tooth extraction and the subsequent implant) they didn’t do the countdown, which surprised me because that was what I remembered most clearly from my lung surgery as a teen. They just asked me if I was comfortable, then said “Good, cause you’re about to get extra comfortable!” and we laughed, then I woke up. Maybe it was a dental surgeon thing? But I’ve also got a really good relationship with the dental techs and the anesthesiologist was a riot.
Not my experience, I was put to sleep through IV and I knew when I was falling asleep. I then had a weird dream mixed with reality, and when I woke up all the text was upside down for a minute.
Same, every time I’ve had a general aesthetic the anaesthesiologist has sat down near my arm, asked if I’m ready, and when I say “yup” he says some medical jargon to the anesthetist/resp nurse, then warns me that it’s going to feel cold and taste funny, he connects a bolus syringe to my IV bung and as he’s pushing tells me to count down from ten, and the anesthetist grabs my head gently as the anaesthesiologist moves around towards my head and presumably grabs some other instruments ready to intubate.
My record is 7. But next time I’m going to try counting faster - not sure why but I’d always try to time it to actual seconds.
For GA, I’ve never been given a gas mask while awake, maybe it’s to do with “rapid induction”, I’m not 100% sure what that is, only that every anaesthesiologist I’ve had has said he’s going to “rapidly induce” because my connective tissue disorder indicates the need to. I never really questioned it.
The only time I’ve been given a mask while being told to count was when I was going under twilight sedation for a colonoscopy. as they were administering the IV, they also gave me a mask that was unexpectedly strawberry “flavoured” and I had a panic attack as I was going under because my grandma is allergic to strawberries, I’m not, but in my semi lucid state I forgot I wasn’t and started mumbling about being allergic to air.
(I’ve only ever had male anaesthesiologists, so apppogies for only using male pronouns to describe the doctor)
I could feel that I was going out as I counted. It felt as if I slowly lifted an inch above the operating table and rested on a fluffy white cloud. I could feel them inserting catheter and needles but it didn’t hurt even a bit, if anything it tickled. Last sight was the grumpy face of this fridge-sized bald anesthesiologist.
Woke up a second later in Intensive Care unit, surprisingly well rested.
By the way, there was no tube in my mouth. They just put a mask on and it smelled sweet.
Same case here with wisdom tooth removal but I do vaguely remember my entire body becoming numb before it stopped being numb instantly and the surgery was over
That’s not how it worked for me either of the two times. I don’t have any memories of going out the first time and I think I kinda woke up kinda normally both times.
Formerly, I was on the Major Incident Response team for a national insurance company. IT Security has always been in their own ivory tower in every company I’ve worked for. But this company IT Security department was about the worst case I’ve ever seen up until that time and since.
They refused to file changes, or discuss any type of change control with the rest of IT. I get that Change Management is a bitch for the most of IT, but if you want to avoid major outages, file a fucking Change record and follow the approval process. The security directors would get some hair brained idea in a meeting in the morning and assign one of their barely competent techs to implement it that afternoon. They’d bring down what ever system they were fucking with. Then my team had to spend hours, usually after business hours, figuring out why a system, which had not seen a change control in two weeks, suddenly stopped working. Would security send someone to the MI meeting? Of course not. What would happen is, we would call the IT Security response team and ask if anything changed on their end. Suddenly 20 minutes later everything was back up and running. With the MI team not doing anything. We would try to talk to security and ask what they changed. They answered “nothing” every god damn time.
They got their asses handed to them when they brought down a billing system which brought in over $10 Billion (yes with a “B”) a year and people could not pay their bills. That outage went straight to the CIO and even the CEO sat in on that call. All of the sudden there was a hard change freeze for a month and security was required to file changes in the common IT record system, which was ServiceNow at the time.
We went from 150 major outages (defined as having financial, or reputation impact to the company) in a single month to 4 or 5.
Fuck IT Security. It’s a very important part of of every IT Department, but it is almost always filled with the most narcissistic incompetent asshats of the entire industry.
At my current company all changes have to happen via GitHub PR and commit because we use GitOps (ex: ArgoCD with Kubernetes). Any changes you do manually are immediately overwritten when ArgoCD notices the config drift.
This makes development more annoying sometimes but I’m so damn glad when I can immediately look at GitHub for an audit trail and source of truth.
It wasn’t InfoSec in this case but I had an annoying tech lead that would merge to main without telling people, so anytime something broke I had his GitHub activity bookmarked and could rule that out first.
Hm can’t say. I’m using bitbucket and it does block admins, though they all have the ability to go into settings and remove the approval requirement. No one does though because then the bad devs would be able to get changes in without reviews.
The past several years I have been working more as a process engineer than a technical one. I’ve worked in Problem Management, Change Management, and currently in Incident for a major defense contractor (yes, you’ve heard of it). So I’ve been on both sides. Documenting an incident is a PITA. File a Change record to restart a server that is in an otherwise healthy cluster? You’re kidding, right? What the hell is a “Problem” record and why do I need to mess with it?
All things I’ve heard and even thought over the years. What it comes down to, the difference between a Mom and Pop operation, that has limited scalability and a full Enterprise Environment that can support a multi-billion dollar business… Is documentation. That’s what those numb nuts in that Insurance Company were too stupid to understand.
Lack of a Change Control process has nothing to do with IT Security except within the domain of Availability. Part of Security is ensuring IT systems are available and working.
You simply experienced working at an organization with poor enforcement of Change Control policies. That was a mistake of oversight, because with competent oversight anyone causing outages by making unapproved changes that cause an outage would be reprimanded and instructed to follow policy properly.
I’m one of those monsters that don’t usually eat oreos.
Never saw the appeal - I prefer sweeter, chocolate or strawberry-flavoured sandwich cookies instead. (Kind of weird given that I tend to gravitate towards bitter food.)
Well, in terms of weight control I gamed the system by staying underweight when young (often very unhealthily and anxiously so) so that middle age weight gain got me to a healthy weight.
I can’t diet because of the early eating disorder, and can’t quite get to intuitive eating either. So as someone else mentioned, I do limit the hours I eat not what or how much.
Lots of beans and rice. Love cheese too. Meat & fruit every week but not every day. Grow some vegetables every season but not enough to rely on; but in fall & spring have fresh greens from the yard, and whatever else I can manage. Make sourdough bread each week. Junk food of choice is chips (both crisps and fries).
Would say a typical day is coffee around 10, a lunch of sandwich or leftovers around noon, a coffee at 1600, a supper around 20:00 because I cook after work and it’s hard to have it earlier. Supper of beans and rice and greens, or meat and rice and greens, or pasta or stir fry, but something creative at least a couple times a week (tonight was poblanos stuffed with black beans, greens, and cheese on a tomato/chipotle sauce). Supper the main meal, not my ideal but most important meal with family. On weekends a late brunch or lunch and meal at teatime only.
If I could have only one sort of meal forever? Beans, rice, and greens.
I just cut my intake in half at lunch and dinner. I find my body needs a decent breakfast with protein. Lunch can be whatever just cut in half and dinner needs to be a decent balance of protein, carbs/starch, and veggie. Oh and lots of water. I cut out the sugary drinks, took a month to wean me off but now I prefer no or low sugar drinks and feel a lot better.
Eh I had one for years then just took a pill and got rid of it. Hell, people intentionally infect themselves with tapeworms all the time as a way to lose weight.
Just 3 seconds. The Oreos manufactured in my part of the world are very porous and absorb liquid way too fast, and I don’t like having my cookie crumble and break into my beverage just mere milliseconds away from touching my lip.
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