Can you Sue If You Woke Up During Surgery?

Undergoing surgery requires a tremendous leap of faith as we place ourselves into the hands of a medical team, understanding that we will be unconscious and completely vulnerable during the procedure. But what happens if an anesthesia error occurs and you find yourself awake during surgery? In the worst cases, awakening during surgery allows the patient to feel the excruciating pain of the surgical process. They may be unable to move, communicate, or otherwise alert the medical team to their conscious status, resulting in severe emotional trauma as well as physical suffering.

Who is responsible for surgical awareness, and can a patient file a lawsuit?

How Common Is Surgical Awareness?

It’s not uncommon to awaken during a procedure such as a colonoscopy, when a mild anesthetic induces only a “twilight sleep”; however, when the surgical procedure involves deep incisions, opening a body cavity, or other extremely invasive procedures, the patient is given general anesthesia. General anesthesia puts the patient into a deep, drug-induced, coma-like state, meant to prevent pain, movement, and consciousness.

Fortunately, anesthesia works as planned in the vast majority of cases. According to Cleveland Clinic data, anesthetic awareness, or waking up during surgery, occurs in only about 1 in 1,000 surgeries. However, the statistics aren’t relevant when you are the patient who awakens during surgery, suffering the extreme pain and terror of surgical awareness.

What Happens During Surgical Awareness?

When applied correctly, general anesthesia shuts down most of the brain’s functions, including breathing, which is why assisted breathing through an airway mask or intubation is required. When an anesthesiologist miscalculates the dose, fails to obtain a complete patient history that could alert them to a patient’s prior reactions to anesthesia, or fails to adequately monitor the patient during surgery, the patient’s brain may regain some of its functions. A state of awareness allows the patient to reach a level of awareness during which they may experience any or all of the following:

• Regaining consciousness and awareness that they are in the middle of surgery, when they are supposed to be unconscious and unaware
• Hearing the surgeon and surgical team talking around them
• Feeling pressure at the surgical site
• Feeling the excruciating pain of invasive open surgery
• Having complete awareness and sensation, while unable to move or alert the medical team

Patients who experience surgical awareness sometimes go on to experience physical and psychological shock followed by ongoing symptoms of distress, including post-surgical PTSD, anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, acute fear of death, or suicide ideation.

Can I File a Lawsuit for Surgical Awareness?

Despite being relatively uncommon, awakening during surgery is a traumatic event with lasting emotional and even physical impacts on the patient. A patient who experiences this trauma may be eligible for compensation through a medical malpractice lawsuit if the evidence demonstrates the following legal standards of medical liability:

• A doctor/patient relationship existed at the time the incident occurred
• The surgeon and/or anesthesiologist owed a duty of care to the patient, requiring them to provide the level of care considered acceptable by the medical community
• They breached this duty of care through negligence
• The breach of duty directly caused harm to the patient
• The patient suffered economic and non-economic damages from the malpractice

Damages in surgical awareness cases often include the economic costs of counseling, therapy, and anxiety medications caused by the after-effects of severe pain and psychological trauma.

If you or a loved one experienced surgical awareness with emotional, physical, and/or economic damages from the experience, you have the right to file a lawsuit against the at-fault party, typically an anesthesiologist or the facility that employs them.