Linda Campbell was not quite 4 years old when her appendix burst, spilling its bacteria-rich contents throughout her abdomen. She was in severe pain, had a high fever, and wouldn't stop crying. Her parents, in a state of panic, brought her to the emergency room in Atlanta, where they lived. Knowing that Campbell's organs were beginning to fail and her heart was on the brink of shutting down, doctors rushed her into surgery.
Today, removing an appendix leaves only a few droplet-size scars. But back then, in the 1960s, the procedure was much more involved. As Campbell recalls, an anesthesiologist told her to count backward from 10 while he flooded her lungs with anesthetic ether gas, allowing a surgeon to slice into her torso, cut out her earthworm-size appendix, and drain her abdomen of infectious slop, leaving behind a lengthy, longitudinal scar.
The operation was successful, but not long after Campbell returned home, her mother sensed that something was wrong. The calm, precocious girl who went into the surgery was not the same one who emerged. Campbell began flinging food from her high chair. She suffered random episodes of uncontrollable vomiting. She threw violent temper tantrums during the day and had disturbing dreams at night. "They were about people being cut open, lots of blood, lots of violence," Campbell remembers. She refused to be alone, but avoided anyone outside her immediate circle. Her parents took her to physicians and therapists. None could determine the cause of her distress. When she was in eighth grade, her parents pulled her from school for rehabilitation.
Over time, Campbell's most severe symptoms subsided, and she learned how to cope with those that remained. She managed to move on, become an accountant, and start a family of her own, but she wasn't cured. Her nightmares continued, and nearly anything could trigger a panic attack: car horns, sudden bright lights, wearing tight-fitting pants or snug collars, even lying flat in a bed. She explored the possibility of post-traumatic stress disorder with her therapists, but could not identify a triggering event. One clue that did eventually surface, though, hinted at a possibly traumatic experience. During a session with a hypnotherapist, Campbell remembered an image, accompanied by an acute feeling of fear, of a man looming over her.
Then, one fall afternoon in 2006, four decades after her symptoms began, Campbell met an anesthesiologist at a hypnotherapy workshop. Over lunch, she found herself telling the anesthesiologist about her condition. She mentioned the appendectomy she'd had not long before everything changed.
The anesthesiologist was intrigued. He told her about a phenomenon that had sometimes accompanied early gas anesthetics, particularly ether, in which patients reacted to the gas by coughing and choking, as if they were suffocating.
The comment sparked something in Campbell. "I started having all these flashes," she remembers. "The flashes were me being on the table. The flashes were of the room. The flashes were of the bright lights over me." A man—the same one from her memory?—was there. At some point, the room went black. "And then I got to the place where I was on the table, and I just remember feeling terror," she says. "That's all I remember. I don't see anything. I don't feel anything. It's absolute, abject terror. And the feeling that I am dying." At that moment, Campbell realized that something had happened to her during her appendectomy, something that changed her forever. After several years of investigation, she figured it out: she had woken up on the table.
This experience is called "intraoperative recall" or "anesthesia awareness," and it's more common than you might think. Although studies diverge, most experts estimate that for every 1,000 patients who undergo general anesthesia each year in the United States, one to two will experience awareness. Patients who awake hear surgeons' small talk, the swish and stretch of organs, the suctioning of blood; they feel the probing of fingers, the yanks and tugs on innards; they smell cauterized flesh and singed hair. But because one of the first steps of surgery is to tape patients' eyes shut, they can't see. And because another common step is to paralyze patients to prevent muscle twitching, they have no way to alert doctors that they are awake.
Many of these cases are benign: vague, hazy flashbacks. But up to 70 percent of patients who experience awareness suffer long-term psychological distress, including PTSD—a rate five times higher than that of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Campbell now understands that this is what happened to her, although she didn't believe it at first. "The whole idea of anesthesia awareness seemed over-the-top," she told me. "It took years to begin to say, 'I think this is what happened to me.' " She describes her memories of the surgery like those from a car accident: the moments before and after are clear, but the actual event is a shadowy blur of emotion. She searched online for people with similar experiences, found a coalition of victims, and eventually traveled up the East Coast to speak with some of them. They all shared a constellation of symptoms: nightmares, fear of confinement, the inability to lie flat (many sleep in chairs), and a sense of having died and returned to life. Campbell (whose name and certain other identifying details have been changed) struggles especially with the knowledge that there is no way for her to prove that she woke up, and that many, if not most, people might not believe her. "Anesthesia awareness is an intrapersonal event," she says. "No one else sees it. No one else knows it. You're the only one."
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