General Anaesthesia

So you're going to receive a general anesthetic. How do we do it? Well, we'll ask you to come to the anesthetic room and you will be lying on a trolley. The first thing we'll be doing is to put a drip in your hand to be able to give you some medication to go off to sleep. We'll then put some monitoring to check your heart rate, your blood pressure, your oxygen level. As you go to sleep, we'll give you an oxygen mask to breathe and all the medication will go through the drip in your hand and you will fall asleep very slowly and nicely. You'll be asleep for the length of the procedure and when you wake up, you will be in recovery where you'll be looked after by a recovery nurse. In recovery, few things, you might have a sore throat because of the device you're going to have in your mouth once you're asleep. Usually if that causes any pain, that will go away fairly quickly will give you some sip of water. Second thing you might feel sore from the surgical side, the surgeon will generally put some local anesthetic or we might be using some local anesthesia, regional anesthesia technique that will give you some very good pain relief. It also will give you some medication intravenously to give you some good pain relief. However, If you do have pain when you wake up, the nurse will be here to ask you this question and to give you some more pain relief. The third very common complication of the general anesthetic is to feel sick, to feel nauseous and vomiting. We'll try to prevent it by giving you some medication intraoperatively. However, if you feel nauseous when you are awake, we'll give you some more medication in recovery.