I woke up during my wisdom teeth extraction and remember the sound of crunching as they hammered or chiseled or something but luckily I couldn't feel anything or don't remember pain, just psychological distress. Googling the experience it appears to be a fairly common thing enough to read similar stories.

In my opinion, it would be a good idea to explain to a patient what is going to happen so if they do wake up they can know what is going on and be less alarmed by the procedure.

I've heard in some lighter procedures (think bone setting or dental work) just an amnesic drug is given as apparently not biologically encoding/remembering a traumatic event seems to produce just as good an outlook as blocking the tramua through unconsciousness/painkillers

>as apparently not biologically encoding/remembering a traumatic event seems to produce just as good an outlook as blocking the tramua through unconsciousness/painkillers

I'll have to look it up, but there is at least one known case of a man who went through conscious but immobilized general anesthesia, through excruciating surgery pain, before the doctors (in this case) realized that they'd forgotten to first give him a certain specific sedative drug as part of his anesthesia cocktail. They rectified this and apparently did so knowing that it would make him forget the trauma he'd just gone through.

However, later, when he woke up from an otherwise successful and complication-free surgery, he soon began to have extremely severe, brutally traumatic anxiety attacks, derived from subconscious memories of what he'd experienced. This went on without resolution to the point where he could no longer socially function at all.. If I remember correctly, he then eventually killed himself as a result.

After his death, his family investigated the last major medical thing he'd gone through (his otherwise routine surgery) and somehow got wind of what the doctors had done, and that they'd known of their own fuckup. The familiy then did manage to gather enough evidence to have the doctors criminally charged, aside from also getting a massive settlement from the hospital itself.

Long story short, I wouldn't count on "just as good an outlook", and especially if I know that, going into such a surgery, the me that feels it before later forgetting what happened will go through a brief living hell of horror.

It's no consolation knowing your future You won't remember a thing if you still have to fully experience that nightmare prima facie.

Colour me skeptical of that notion. Trauma and anxiety have a way of driving themselves deep, and somebody who has anxiety problems emerge or worsen an indeterminate amount of time post-intervention is unlikely to ever establish the link, let alone then go on to prove it to anybody else if they somehow did stumble upon the answer.