It is believed to affect about 0.1–0.2 percent of all surgery patients in the US.
Anesthesia awareness occurs because two different types of anesthesia are used in surgery, one to disable the body’s movement and one to put you to sleep.
This is what happened to 73-year-old Sherman Sizemore when he went in for exploratory surgery in 2006.
It was a full 16 minutes before the anesthesiologist remembered to administer the drug to render Sizemore unconscious, meaning he felt a full 16 minutes of surgery.
