General Anesthesia

When regional anesthesia isn’t enough, general anesthesia is the answer. Our experts use medication and monitoring to bring you through surgery safely and pain-free.

When local or regional anesthesia isn’t enough—and it isn’t for most surgeries involving the brain, abdomen or chest—general (or full) anesthesia is the answer. At Lehigh Valley Hospital, we use general anesthesia for more than 28,000 complex surgeries each year.

With general anesthesia, you are completely unaware of your surroundings, or unconscious. Our expert team, which includes an anesthesiologist and nurse anesthetist, uses medication and monitoring to bring you through surgery safely and comfortably.

Before you enter the operating room, a nurse may give you an oral sedative. Then, inside the OR, the nurse attaches monitoring instruments to keep track of your breathing, heart rate and blood pressure. The anesthesia team then begins to deliver medication through an intravenous (IV) needle, and once you’re asleep, they insert a breathing tube in your mouth to help you breathe. As surgery proceeds, your anesthesia team keeps a close eye on you to make sure you are breathing properly and not sensing pain.

After the surgery, you’ll be transferred to the recovery room, where you will start to emerge from anesthesia. You may feel disoriented as you emerge, and the amount of time it takes to feel “yourself” again varies.

With medical advances, serious complications from general anesthesia have become very rare. When you meet with your anesthesiologist, you can discuss some of the minor risks, which may include: oral or dental trauma from the breathing tube, minor irritation from rubbing your eyes, contact injuries from being immobile or a compression injury to a peripheral nerve. These, too, are rare.

Advances in Anesthesia Increase Its Safety

Our anesthesia experts use advanced medications and monitoring that drastically reduce risks associated with general anesthesia. They include:

• Better ways to monitor oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body
• New medications that prevent nausea or vomiting
• Technologies to measure brain waves to ensure you are unconscious and unaware of sensations
• Special methods to diagnose and guide surgery for heart problems

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