General Anesthesia for surgery can cause or worsen cognitive problems

[daffodil48]

Read this article about how anesthesia can affect cognition in elderly patients and people with neuro degenerative illnesses. My husband had gallbladder surgery 6 months ago and that night I got a call from he hospital that he was very paranoid, hustling down the ward in the nude, ripped out his IV said he was looking for a bathroom and very combative. This was very unlike him. They asked me talk to him on the phone to see if I could talk him down and he hung up on me so I had to drive in at 2am. He was calmed down a bit when I got there, back in bed, but still a little paranoid. He took a few hours to come completely out of it. I do feel his condition declined a little after that. agingcare.com/Articles/how-...

[Marie_14]

Daffodil you are right. It is a known cause of a decline in someone with a neurodegenerative condition if they have a general anaesthetic. Sadly in the circumstances there was not a lot you could do? Gallbladder pain is terrible. I had mine removed when I was about 20! So at least it's one thing your husband won't have to suffer from now?

Marie x

[daffodil48 in reply to Marie_14]

yes it was definitely needed. He also had triple bypass heart surgery couple of years before. He certainly doesn't need any more surgeries

[Javan]

My wife who has CBD also has gallstones. They would not operate because anesthesia was seen as being dangerous and could only be tried as a last resort .

[Marie_14 in reply to Javan]

Javan how does she cope with the pain? I can see why they don't want to operate but she must be in a lot of pain? Do they give her an injection to knock her out when she gets pain from it? I remember the doctor did that with me once because I was in agony. It was meant to send me asleep but when he came back I hadn't slept although the pain had gone! Typical.

Marie x

[Javan in reply to Marie_14]

She has had three children ,so her pain tolerance is high. All she takes is paracetamol when needed. A massage and a cuddle makes her laugh, so all is well. She has never liked taking drugs for anything.

[daffodil48 in reply to Marie_14]

My sister almost died because of gall bladder complications and hubby's surgeon said his gall bladder was nasty that they caught it just in time.

[LostinHeadSpace in reply to Javan]

After I had my gallbladder out (with terrible complications), someone told me that there's a protocol for flushing out gallstones, it's pretty miserable they said, flushing out the system as if for a colonoscopy--there were certain things you had to take--I'm sure it's on the internet. I had the surgery, but would have tried this other thing had I known about it first.

[Kevin_1]

Hi daffodil. Thanks for posing this.

Best

Kevin

[Gingerw3]

Last fall my husband had prostate surgery at the age of 56. I knew within 24 hours that he would never be the same. He was like a small child. The doctors all just shake their heads and say it happens. My best guess is that if there is already disease and dementia present at whatever level....the brain just cannot recover from the anesthesia. We now know that he likely had PSP at the time of the surgery. But the anesthesia clearly sped up the degeneration beyond belief.

[Karynleitner]

We had a similar experience , but we did not notice it until about 2 weeks after the surgery. It was an apathy and personality change. Perhaps at first we just thought he was worn out etc from the surgery.

The change was significant enough that the surgeon thought he was depressed and friends asked “what did they do to Dan”. For a long time we really felt something may have happened during the surgery. Scary