My Tonsillectomy Experience: Anesthesia

I got my tonsils out yesterday afternoon and it was the first time I have ever been under general anesthesia.  I can only barely remember being in the recovery room afterwards, everything is really hazy up until I woke up a second time in the car on the way home.  But here is what I do remember:  I had been having a really good dream, and when I woke up from surgery I felt perfectly calm and extremely content.  I woke up smiling and was almost immediately lucid - I'm told that the doctors and nurses all loved it.  I kept trying to tell my mom about this delightful dream I'd had, but apparently every time I started to tell her then a nurse or doctor would walk in and I'd stop talking about it.  Too bad because I certainly can't remember any of the details now so I will never know . .  .

My mom says that they gave me a packet of post-op instructions and apparently as I read over it I found a sentence that was poorly worded and pointed it out to the nurse, and recommended how they could fix it, and the nurse called over the doctor and they actually agreed with me and were really amazed.  We discussed other possible wording choices/sentence structures for a few minutes, and they asked me if I was an English major ha ha.

So . . . that was my first experience under anesthesia.  I was kind of nervous going into it because as I was sitting in the little room waiting to be taken into my surgery I could hear someone else waking up from theirs and it was not a very pleasant sound.  They were pretty panicky and disoriented, and at one point they started hyperventilating, and then they started throwing up (all of which I'm told are very common reactions to waking up from anesthesia after a tonsillectomy).  It was definitely a tender mercy that I had such a delightful dream and that it carried over to when I woke up - I can't imagine a better way to wake up from surgery.

Fun facts about anesthesia:  Apparently nausea and vomiting are extremely common side effects of anesthesia.  I looked it up and these are all the factors that put you at higher risk to experience this:

• Female Gender (check)
• Younger age (check)
• Nonsmoker (check)
• History of motion sickness (nope - thankfully)
• Family history of post-operative nausea and vomiting (check)
• Any surgery lasting longer than 30 minutes (check)
• Type of surgery.  Tonsillectomy = very high risk (check)

How on earth I avoided THAT when I woke up I will never know since apparently I fit every single criteria except one, but happily I didn't even feel the tiniest bit nauseated when I woke up.  All in all, another tender mercy.

P.S.  I just realized that this marks the 50th post that I have posted on this blog.  Happy birthday to me!