Dr. Sherine Hanna, MD

Anesthesia ladys as long as the surgery. As soon as surgery is done. Anestgesia is reversed and patient wakes up. This usually takes few minutes and then patient is taken to recovery room and allowed to fully wake up. This varies from patient to patient. It could be 15 minutes to a couple of hours depending on the amount of pain that the patient is experiencing and need to give narcotics and further observe as well as many other factors.

It depends on what kind of hand surgery it is and how long it’s anticipated to be. For something simple like carpal tunnel, some sedation and surgeon puts local at the incision. For some complicated hand cases, upper extremity nerve blocks with general anesthesia or with sedation can be used.

Usually, it is not a good idea to be under for eye surgery. The surgeon uses topical anesthesia to numb the eye and patient is given light sedation so as not to move while surgeon is working on their eye. The patient should have no pain. They see bright lights and follow surgeon instruction to look in different directions. The surgeon works with tiny instruments under a microscope and it’s imperative that the patient is not heavily sedated so as not to snore or move the head in Amy way as this may cause eye injury.

There is a phenomenon called emergence delirium where kids are delirious when waking up from anesthesia. Many times, they don’t recognize their parents and they are not consolable. There are medications that can help with emergence delirium. The important thing to keep in mind is that they won’t remember that and there are no long term effects.