Woken in the early hours this morning by Simon crying out in his sleep.
It’s quite disturbing when he does this. He sounds genuinely distressed: “Help! Help! Help!” I used to wake him up when it happened but then I read you’re better off just letting them sleep, because otherwise they’ll remember the dream, whereas if you just leave them alone, they’ll have forgotten it by the next day.
Years ago, Simon and I were doing a guided horse ride somewhere in rural New Zealand when the subject of our jobs came up. The young woman who was guiding us said that she’d heard that people were awake during their operations but the drugs we used just stopped them remembering the ordeal. I was horrified and assured her that that was very unlikely.
Imagine my surprise the either day when a group of us were chatting in the theatre control room at the end of our shift and one of the senior registrars said that his aim with the sick and elderly was ”awareness without recall”. it was a technique he’d learned in the NHS, he said. When you see how little of our anaesthetic drugs you can get away with, as some of his seniors over there do, then you’re more comfortable using less. Certainly there’s a downside to using more drugs than you need, in that you have to then give different drugs to combat dose related side effects like low blood pressure, and in extremis there are worse things than awareness (like CPR). Still, I don’t think most of us would advocate this as a policy. It’s possible he was joking – you never can tell with Englishmen – but it was a little chilling, nonetheless.