Kate Cole-Adams. (2017). Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness. Catapult.

Kate Cole-Adams. 2017. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness. Catapult.

Kate Cole-Adams, Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness. Catapult, 2017.

Kate Cole-Adams. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness. Catapult, 2017.

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1. • role: Author
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   • bioText: Kate Cole-Adams is a journalist and novelist. Her debut novel, Walking to the Moon, was published in 2008. She lives in Melbourne with her family.
   • name: Kate Cole-Adams

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Anesthesia

fullDescription

"An obsessive, mystical, terrifying, and even phantasmagorical exploration of anesthesia’s shadowy terra incognita." —The New Yorker
Anesthetize: to render insensible
First there’s the injection, then the countdown—and next thing you know, you’re awake. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness is the story of the time in between, an exploration of that most crucial and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables us to undergo procedures that would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful.
In the past 150 years, anesthesia has made surgical intervention routine, from open–heart surgery to the facelift. But how much do anesthesiologists really know about what happens when their patients go under? Can we hear and retain what’s going on? Is pain still pain if we don’t remember it? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body’s experience of being sliced open and ransacked—and how can we help ourselves through it all?
Kate Cole–Adams weaves her own personal experiences with surgery and its aftermath with the explorations and personal accounts of others, doctors and patients alike—accounts of people who wake under the knife, who experience traumatic reactions, dreams, hallucinations, and submerged memories—accounts that evoke and illuminate the provisional nature of the self.
Haunting, lyrical, sometimes shattering, Cole–Adams leavens science with personal experience, and brings an intensely human curiosity to the unknowable realm beyond consciousness.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: The New Yorker
   • content: "An obsessive, mystical, terrifying, and even phantasmagorical exploration of anesthesia’s shadowy terra incognita.""
2. • premium: False
   • source: The Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Ms. Cole–Adams’s journey was spurred by her discovery in 2010 that she was to be scheduled for major spinal surgery. A novelist as well as a journalist . . . she writes fluidly and dramatically, using her travels, researches, and interviews to trace her anxieties about her forthcoming general anesthetic back to their roots. Her book is as much a diary of the writing process as a scientific investigation.""
3. • premium: False
   • source: Los Angeles Review of Books
   • content: "Cole–Adams gives us something valuable: a humanistic meditation on pain and our will to forgetting . . . Anesthesia . . . serves as an apt metaphor for our cultural impulse toward numbness . . . Awake to the eventualities of suffering and death, Anesthesia suggests, we might treat ourselves--and each other--more kindly."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Booklist
   • content: "Her book explores the terrifying topic of anesthesia awareness . . . Cole–Adams blends bits of pharmacology, neurology, philosophy, and ethics with interviews of patients, researchers, and anesthesiologists . . . with big, baffling questions about the nature of consciousness and memory."
5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 1, 2017
     Melbourne-based journalist and novelist Cole-Adams (Walking to the Moon, 2008) blends research, reflection, and memoir to try to grapple with the meaning of consciousness.When someone is anesthetized for an operation, they are usually told that they will be "going to sleep." What actually happens is much more complex, and not even anesthesiologists can agree on or fully explain what happens under anesthesia. In her first work of nonfiction, the author seeks to uncover some of the ethical implications of this procedure, such as the potential impact of words by doctors when a patient is unconscious or how to deal with the small but still troubling percentage of patients who wake up in pain during surgery, unable to communicate. She depicts her interactions with some of the foremost researchers working to understand these and other questions--e.g., why patients remember things that happened under anesthesia only when hypnotized and how an anesthesiologist can actually tell if a patient is awake. While Cole-Adams has amassed a lot of useful information and telling anecdotes, her purpose is not to simply narrate a history of anesthesia or to describe with scientific detail what happens to the brain when anesthetized. Incorporating dream accounts and bits of memoir, weaving in and out of her own and others' stories, and sharing her own limitations of understanding, the author uses a collagelike structure that seems to mimic the amorphous nature of the mind as someone drifts into unconsciousness under anesthesia. As Cole-Adams writes, "part of the difficulty in talking about anesthesia--not how to do it, but what it actually does--is that any discussion veers almost immediately into the mystery of consciousness."While the author raises more questions than she answers, and some readers may be put off by her less-that-straightforward style, these are thought-provoking questions, and Cole-Adams presents a lyrical journey through the vital question of what it means to be human.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     October 9, 2017
     Australian journalist and novelist Cole-Adams (Walking to the Moon) mingles her own experiences under anesthesia with those of other patients and doctors, producing a personal work that is a mix of agony and insight. Anesthesiologists, she writes, routinely overestimate the amount of “anesthetic cocktail” needed to sedate a patient, but a strong dose still does not prevent “one or two per thousand” patients from waking up during surgery. Cole-Adams relates patients’ experiences of pain and paralysis; she also chats with psychologists as they prepare patients for surgery and, later, work with patients who have difficulty getting back to health after surgery. A medical history of anesthesia is worked through the text. Cole-Adams considers surgical-room banter and its effects on patients; she refers to a strange incident in which a patient became suicidal after surgery, revealing under hypnosis that she heard the surgeon say she was fat. The limitations of hypnosis, the complexities of memory, and the difference between the conscious and unconscious minds are questions that persist throughout this book. Cole-Adams weaves her own mounting personal problems throughout the text. Readers may react to this work similarly to the psychiatrist who told Cole-Adams, “I’m not certain whether you’re trying to sort yourself out, or whether you’re trying to sort out other things.” Agent: Jenny Darling, Jenny Darling & Associates (Aus.).

7. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     December 1, 2017
     The disappearing act. That's how Cole-Adams, an Australian author fretful over forthcoming spinal surgery for scoliosis, portrays general anesthesia. A significant portion of her book explores the terrifying topic of anesthesia awareness (one or two patients in a thousand describe waking up while under anesthesia). Current anesthetic concoctions consist of three main ingredients: a hypnotic agent that induces and maintains unconsciousness, a neuromuscular paralytic compound to prevent the body from moving, and analgesics to block pain. Cole-Adams blends bits of pharmacology, neurology, philosophy, and ethics with interviews of patients, researchers, and anesthesiologists in her examination of the subject, but she is left with big, baffling questions about the nature of consciousness and memory. And what about the possibility that general anesthesia might somehow permanently change who we are? It's tantalizing (and scary) to imagine what exactly happens to us when we are chemically put to sleep. What's our mind up to while we're under; is it hibernating or unleashed? Readers may find some stretches of Anesthesia numbing, but there is sufficient science and mystery to keep them entranced.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

popularity

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"An obsessive, mystical, terrifying, and even phantasmagorical exploration of anesthesia’s shadowy terra incognita." —The New Yorker
Anesthetize: to render insensible
First there’s the injection, then the countdown—and next thing you know, you’re awake. Anesthesia: The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of Consciousness is the story of the time in between, an exploration of that most crucial and baffling gift of modern medicine: the disappearing act that enables us to undergo procedures that would otherwise be impossibly, often fatally, painful.
In the past 150 years, anesthesia has made surgical intervention routine, from open–heart surgery to the facelift. But how much do anesthesiologists really know about what happens when their patients go under? Can we hear and retain what’s going on? Is pain still pain if we don’t remember it? How does the unconscious mind deal with the body’s...

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tableOfContents

Table of Contents
Introduction: Into the blue
Part 1
Going under
1 Awake
Rachel Benmayor wakes during surgery; awareness and the nature and history of anesthetics
2 Denial
What anesthetists say about their craft; the author's mother receives a diagnosis
3 Paralysis
Muscle relaxants in anesthesia: awakening helpless
4 Two hearts
How do you measure unconsciousness?

Part 2
The cold bosom of the ocean
5 Questions without answers
The experts investigating memory and awareness in anesthesia
6 Things you don't know you know
The unconscious
7 Weird science
Hypnosis
8 Moonless nights
Taking in information under anesthesia
9 Lost days
Searching for memories under hypnosis
10 The most famous anesthetist in the world
Ted Eger and the attempt to test the unrepeatable experiment

Part 3
Adrift
11 The island
Experiments on the working of the brain
12 Dreams
13 Altered states
Hallucinations after surgery
14 Ghost stories
'The parts of ourselves that are not available to conscious inquiry'

Part 4 Small bright fish
15 General amnesia
The role of forgetting in anesthesia
16 A working hypothesis
Unconscious memory, unremembered awareness
17 The memory keepers
Propofol, benzodiazepines – and who really benefits from anesthetic amnesia
18 The perfect anesthetic
Light anesthesia and sedation

Part 5
Merging currents
19 Coming apart
Questions about the dynamic unconscious
20 The hypnotist
The author in pursuit of her unconscious
21 Regression
Fear, vulnerability and ceding control

Part 6
Surfacing
22 Pulsations and palpitations
The brain and its waves
23 The shallows
Surveying long term psychological effects
24 Blood and blushing
Patients managing their experience of surgery
25 Ballast
The apprehension of death and the importance of the 'selves' we bring to surgery
26 That younger me
The author approaches her own surgery and her past self
27 Flying fish
Dreams, memories and the journey back to self; a reunion with Rachel Benmayor
28 Letting go
An operation and a death
29 Wings
An awakening

Notes
Sources
Index

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1. • code: MED006000
   • description: Medical / Anesthesiology
2. • code: MED039000
   • description: Medical / History
3. • code: PSY008000
   • description: Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition