groshe

anesthesia resident here. The paralytics work on skeletal muscle. They don't work on cardiac muscle or smooth muscle (like in the bowels or blood vessels) because those don't have the same receptors on their surfaces.

haha, I will be careful!! Even though true anesthesia awareness with recall (which it sounds like you had) is very rare, it's one of those things that when it happens, is really really horrific for the anesthesiologist as well (although not nearly as bad as it is for the patient of course). In several states in the U.S. if anything goes wrong during the surgery, and the anesthesiologist says the words "I'm sorry", that can be taken to imply guilt, and I'm wondering if maybe that leads some anesthesiologist to try to avoid admitting that something bad happened in the first place. Where I live, that's not the case, and we are taught that if something bad happens to our patient, we should do the decent thing and say "I'm sorry" whether we did or did not directly cause it.