I was hoping this article would go deeper into the fact that anesthesia is actually a combination of paralytics and what people traditionally think of as anesthesia. The drugs that “knock you out” or even just make you forget the pain are not what makes you feel paralyzed. They actually give you paralytics to do just that. Succinylcholine will render you completely paralyzed, unable to even breath, while still conscious. Interesting field though. Midazolam is weird. I once watched an ER doc set a teenager’s broken ankle using Midazolam. The kids felt the pain, that’s for sure! But was pretty much awake through it all. Five minutes later he had no memory of the event. The same doctor claimed that they used to Midazolam for childbirth, but they found it caused women to have a horrible type of post-pardum depression. The theory, he said, was that their bodies already did something to make them forget the true pain of childbirth (who would have a 2nd otherwise?!?) but not the birth itself. Whereas the drug made them forget everything. It also brings up the idea of memory-as-personality-or-personal-reality. So if your brain records no memory of the event, it never really “happened” to you in some way. I’m not talking about buried memory, but the shutting off of that recording mechanism of the brain. If you had no memory past the last minute, could you “be” who you are?
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