July 1, 2026 Salus Health Care Forum

Gay

I’m interested in hearing from those of you who are in the anesthesia world. I don’t remember getting any postoperative advice: “Hey, you should get out and walk”. I do anyway, but I don’t remember getting any sort of that. Here’s a great way to get past some of the anesthesia when you have full command of your body.  I only remember being in post-op and having them check on me.

Mark

Are you use glasses all the time? Is that correct?

Gay

Pretty much. I have to. Yes.

Mark

Did you get your glasses in the recovery room pretty quickly or not?

Gay

That is a great question.

Mark

That simple thing, hearing aids, glasses. But you know what the number one thing was, that could raise anxiety? It was the availability of dentures. People who wear dentures but didn’t get them put back on right away got freaked out. For many of them dentures were just part of their appearance. I had to promise them that I would put their dentures back in as soon as I extubated them. And that simple thing relieved anxiety, which can trigger post-op delirium.

Jeremy

It’s interesting hearing this conversation because part of it makes me think of Timothy Leary and the early days of psychedelics. Is it good for you? Bad for you? Are you ostracized for even wanting to talk about the topic? Part of me is thinking, gosh, there’s also all the positive things where anesthesia is entering into the neurobehavioral area. My way of seeing relates to airplanes, which are the safest thing. I imagine if this percentage of problems happened on an airplane, the feedback would get back to the airline industry. If this many people got delirious every time they flew, there would be strategic meetings every day of the airline industry concerning what to do about this problem. And yet in our healthcare industry, it goes on forever because it happens one person at a time. One person is freaked out, scared, not sure what to do. They are feeling disempowered, can’t find their car keys. So they’re not in a position of agency when they go through this process.

The other thing I think about is that education about anesthesia is so isolated and so specialized that no one else really understands it. And so hearing Mark’s discussion of these commonsense approaches are new to me. I’m sure Mark tried to teach it to me when I was learning from him.

But in any event, I just think that the lack of social awareness around this is huge. The statistics are unknown. I first started thinking about this with people having their carotid artery endarterectomy. It turned out that they had a stroke because of it, or they had open heart surgery and had a stroke after. So the neurological impacts finally started to sink in to me.

This area seems super rich and under discussed. I’m glad we’re talking about it.