{"id":8884,"date":"2021-09-30T12:04:59","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T19:04:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=8884"},"modified":"2021-10-28T08:55:45","modified_gmt":"2021-10-28T15:55:45","slug":"anesthesia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2021\/09\/anesthesia\/","title":{"rendered":"Anesthesia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Update, October 10: Turns out when I wrote this, the anesthesia was still clouding my brain — my prose is even more confused and incoherent than usual. I’ll leave it up as written, so to show what anesthesia can do to you.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In college, I took a class with Lucius Outlaw, Jr., in which we read Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.<\/em> Husserl’s book opened up the possibility of observing the stream of one’s own consciousness, something I’ve been interested in, and have practiced, ever since. So when I went in for a colonoscopy yesterday, I decided to take the opportunity to try to observe what happened as I was given anesthesia, and later how I came out of anesthesia <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking back to a previous colonoscopy, I realized that I simply couldn’t remember some things I knew had happened after coming out of the anesthesia. I couldn’t, for example, remember getting dressed, though I knew I had done so. Before I underwent anesthesia yesterday, I wanted to see what I could retain in memory from the time I went under anesthesia until I arrived back at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a clear memory of when I lost consciousness. One of the nurses asked me to settle myself slightly differently on the gurney, which I did, and then — nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I can’t remember when I came out of the anesthesia. The previous time, I remember coming out of the anesthesia as the doctor was retracting the camera from my colon; I remember seeing the camera’s images on the video screen over my head. This time, I only have a few disconnected memories that may or may not be real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I remember seating myself in the wheelchair so they could wheel me out to where Carol was waiting to pick me up; but this may be an imagined memory, since I had already been worried about whether I could fit my six-foot-five-inch frame comfortably in the wheelchair (these are the kinds of things tall people worry about). I most definitely do not remember getting out of the hospital gown and into my own clothes. I think I remember getting wheeled out to the car, and maybe I remember getting up out of the wheelchair into the car, but those memories are just fragments of images and voices; the fragments don’t form a continuous chain of memory; and some of these memories appear more like dreams than actual memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think I remember parts of the drive home. Mostly I remember asking Carol if she would please stop at our local supermarket so I could get some food that I thought would sit well on my very empty stomach. But did we drive up Hillsdale Boulevard, or did we take our usual route up Highway 92? I think we went up Hillsdale, but I may think that because I definitely remember when we were driving to the colonoscopy we saw a big traffic jam westbound on Highway 92 caused by construction, so we had concluded that we should probably drive up Hillsdale. I’m pretty sure I remember Carol pulling into the parking lot at the supermarket, and I definitely remember walking around the supermarket because I was feeling disoriented and unsteady (I almost asked Carol to hold my hand). But there are definite holes in my memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t really remember the drive from the supermarket to our house. And it seems to me that there are chunks missing from my memory of yesterday afternoon, though I can’t be sure. Even now, twenty-one hours after having gone under anesthesia, I still don’t feel completely back to normal — though I probably wouldn’t have noticed that if I hadn’t made the effort to recall what I had remembered since I was given anesthesia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s really fascinating about this is that because of the anesthesia, I don’t have an uninterrupted linear flow of thoughts and memories for the past twenty-one hours. No doubt the mechanistic neuroscientists will have their explanation based on imaging of electrical impulses in the brain, while psychologists might have different explanations. But I’m simply making a phenomenological investigation, that is, observations made as it were from the inside: it’s been a fascinating experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update, October 10: Turns out when I wrote this, the anesthesia was still clouding my brain — my prose is even more confused and incoherent than usual. I’ll leave it up as written, so to show what anesthesia can do to you. In college, I took a class with Lucius Outlaw, Jr., in which we … Continue reading “Anesthesia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[669,427],"tags":[423],"class_list":["post-8884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoir","category-philosophy","tag-edmund-husserl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8884"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8939,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8884\/revisions\/8939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}