I work in a hospital and I'm involved in this sort thing pretty regularly. (We call them conscious or procedural sedations in our hospital.) It's a little wild being on the other side of it, where we see the the patient go under, our doc does the thing (relocating their joints, say, or mashing the button to send 200 joules across their heart), and the patient subsequently wakes. They never remember, even if they were wincing (or sometimes screaming) literal seconds before.
I'm so glad you commented because, as many times as I've been told this is how it works, on some level it still feels like this isn't a real thing, it's science fiction. You're the first person to tell me about seeing this from the outside!
I've always experienced anesthetic as a sneak peak at death. It's instant. You're here one second and gone the next. Some time later, you're back again, with no knowledge of what happened in the world in the intervening time.
I find being anesthetized for surgery deeply disconcerting.
Oddly, I've been working on something that has an underlying premise that we are not our memories. A brief scene has a protestor holding a sign that reads 'memory is god's punishment'.
It's funny, I just finished re-reading The Bell Jar and Plath touched on this both with watching a woman experience "Twilight Birthing" and thinking how cruel it is to erase the memories of pain in childbirth so the woman will continue having children and experiencing this pain freshly every time, and the distrust of "it's just like falling asleep" with the electroshock because "what if it just looks like they're asleep but really inside they're experiencing this torment?"
I work in a hospital and I'm involved in this sort thing pretty regularly. (We call them conscious or procedural sedations in our hospital.) It's a little wild being on the other side of it, where we see the the patient go under, our doc does the thing (relocating their joints, say, or mashing the button to send 200 joules across their heart), and the patient subsequently wakes. They never remember, even if they were wincing (or sometimes screaming) literal seconds before.
I'm so glad you commented because, as many times as I've been told this is how it works, on some level it still feels like this isn't a real thing, it's science fiction. You're the first person to tell me about seeing this from the outside!
Happy to provide some perspective!
I've always experienced anesthetic as a sneak peak at death. It's instant. You're here one second and gone the next. Some time later, you're back again, with no knowledge of what happened in the world in the intervening time.
I find being anesthetized for surgery deeply disconcerting.
Oddly, I've been working on something that has an underlying premise that we are not our memories. A brief scene has a protestor holding a sign that reads 'memory is god's punishment'.
'memory is god's punishment' - I love it
It's funny, I just finished re-reading The Bell Jar and Plath touched on this both with watching a woman experience "Twilight Birthing" and thinking how cruel it is to erase the memories of pain in childbirth so the woman will continue having children and experiencing this pain freshly every time, and the distrust of "it's just like falling asleep" with the electroshock because "what if it just looks like they're asleep but really inside they're experiencing this torment?"