Oh yeah, I know about this. I had surgery on my sinuses back in the 90s and I couldn’t read a book for years. (Considering that I’d normally rip through at least four a week, it was a BIG change.) I could read magazine articles, but I couldn’t sustain the attention, focus and memory needed to read a novel. It took a long time to bounce back — at least three or four years.
I suspect this happens to many more people than they’ll ever admit. When I tried to talk to my doctor about it, I got the equivalent of an eyeroll:
Deep anesthesia has also been linked to subtler but longer-lasting cognitive problems. In a 2013 study, doctors at a Hong Kong hospital monitored the brain activity of 462 patients undergoing major surgery, keeping the electrical activity as high as possible while still inducing general anesthesia. For another 459 patients receiving general anesthesia, the doctors monitored only blood pressure and heart rate. Patients received either propofol or one of several anesthetic gases. The morning after surgery, 16 percent of patients who had received light anesthesia displayed confusion, compared with 24 percent of the routine care group. Likewise, 15 percent of patients who received typical anesthesia had postoperative mental setbacks that lingered for at least three months—they performed poorly on word-recall tests, for example—but only 10 percent of those in the light anesthesia group had such difficulties.
In some cases, these mental handicaps persist longer than a few months. Jane Saczynski, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and her colleagues tracked the mental abilities of patients 60 years and older in the Boston area for up to one year after heart bypass or valve surgery. Based on tests of memory and attention in which patients repeated phrases and named everyday objects, those who did not develop any delirium generally regained their presurgery mental capabilities within a month, whereas patients with postoperative delirium took between six months and a full year to recuperate. Patients whose mental fog lasted more than three days after surgery had still not regained their full acumen a year after the operation.
This hasn’t been a problem for me. My issue is that the anesthetic wears off before the procedure is finished.
Friend of my mother’s, a woman sharp as a tack, great word skills, etc., never quite recovered from open heart surgery. Memory issues, difficulty focusing, etc.
Also, she was not given sufficient physical therapy and was never able to stand up straight after the surgery. The tissues in the chest area pulled inward. She was game but unhappy and lost zest for life.