A new movie opens today fictionalizing a medical nightmare that's all too real for some patients. When you head into an operating room, you assume you will be unconscious and feel no pain. But as many as 40,000 Americans a year wake up during surgery, hearing and sometimes even feeling what's happening. Here's ABC's John McKenzie.
It is one horror not even Hollywood can exaggerate. You are unconscious from anesthesia and suddenly your brain awakens. So you hear and feel everything.
Wait... Something’s wrong.
But your body remains paralyzed.
I am still awake.
Unable to cry out for help, unable to stop the pain. No...
Waking up during surgery, that's just what happened to Gennady Madelyn.
As soon as he put the scalpel into my flesh, it was like as if someone took a blowtorch or something and stuck it in the right side of my stomach.
But she was powerless to stop it.
I couldn't speak to let somebody know that I was awake and I couldn't move anything I was buried alive inside myself, frozen from head to toe.
It is what doctors call "Anesthesia Awareness". The National Commission that accredits hospitals calls it a "frightening phenomenon" that's under-recognized and under-treated.
The problem often boils down to basic medical errors, anesthesiologist using the wrong drugs or inadequate doses of the right drugs.
One solution according to Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston is using a brain monitor.
The brain wave activity starts to get to a point where we see that awareness is a potential problem and so we can deepen the anesthesia. The machine which sells for as little as 5,000 dollars was reassuring to Bill Ham this morning. It takes away the chance for human error, you know, in anesthesia. But the American society of anesthesiologists is not convinced, saying there is just not enough evidence to prove the machines are effective. So for now most doctors rely on blood pressure and heart rate to signal whether a patient is waking up and hoping it's not too soon.
John McKenzie, ABC News, New York.
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