What does it feel like to go under and then wake up from general anesthesia?

Lose time: Many of my patients state that the time under anesthesia is like lost time --not sleep. They have no sense of what happened during the period of anesthesia and it is like they went through time.

Very Few Know: With modern anesthetics we try and shut down the memory of the patient before they go to the or. Once they can't remember what happened, it is very hard to find out what they felt as they went to sleep. Without sedatives the very medication that is used to put people to sleep blocks memory formation, so we have the same problem. Same with waking up. Patients come to in the pacu after the op.