...and as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
As one who went under inhaled anesthesia a dozen times or more as a child in the 70s, I can only say, "WTF?" It makes a great solvent, so let's put in anesthesia?
Literally, yes. The potency of an inhalation anesthetic is usually directly proportional to its lipid solubility. (Known as the Meyer-Overton correlation.) This is why solvents such as ether and chloroform were used as anesthetics and why N₂O is both an anesthetic and is dissolved in cream to form whipped cream.
The mechanism of inhalation anesthetics is not completely understood but it's thought that they interact with lipids in cell membranes and disrupt stuff. The better they dissolve in lipids, the lower the concentration that is needed for anesthesia.
There's a nice graph on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_general_anaestheti...
Whipped cream is cream with colloidal air in it. Mostly regular atmospheric air, but any gas that is safe to eat and has no flavor would function equivalently. If the air were dissolved in the cream, it would just be cream, not whipped cream.
Wikipedia says that the purpose of nitrous oxide in commercial whipped cream canisters is to be stored (dissolved) at very high pressure so that, when the pressure is released, it can whip the cream by undissolving from it. (And that the secondary purpose is that the nitrous oxide doubles as a preservative.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipped-cream_charger#Culinary
To be fair though, the restricted audience for the administration of this particular chemical would seem to indicate considerations of safety have been applied, otherwise one would expect a more general pattern. One must suspect there are many more chemicals with similarly hard-to-test-for longterm effects in daily use, note especially the so-called 'forever chemicals' (PFAS).
What's more, dose / length of exposition makes a poison, so it's not possible to say in the abstract how a short but intense exposition of TCE stacks up against 24/7 exposition of low levels over the entire childhood. Meaning there's hope here.
Also can you be sure it was TCE you received? I remember one general anesthesia when I was maybe 9 or so and that was pretty definitely laughing gas. It might have been the same in (some of) your case(s), too.
I remember feeling like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich being folded in half, and then the lights went out.
Hopefully one-off cases don't significantly affect the chances of getting a serious neurological disorder later in life -- it seems we'll find out in the coming years...
My father and grandfather were anesthesiologists. We kind of adopted an older nurse anesthetist as a surrogate grandmother when I was a kid. She told us stories of back in the old days, sitting there with a stopwatch with one hand on the patient's wrist taking their pulse, and a dropper full of chloroform in the other hand, placing drops on a gauze mask over the patient's mouth when the pulse rate started going up. She always got significant amounts of second-hand anesthetic exposure.
She said it was pretty common after a long day of work to drive home quite high from all of the chloroform exposure. I presume TCE anesthesia was similar, and nurse anesthetists likely got at least 10,000 times the lifetime exposure that you got. Granted, there can be differences due to age of exposure, and often non-linearities of exposure. However, if the risks of a single surgery under TCE anesthesia were significant, I'm pretty sure someone would have noted absurd rates of parkinson's in nurse anesthetists.
Certainly, read up on the early signs of Parkinson's, and talk to your doctor if you think you might start showing symptoms, but don't get hypochondria over it.
Cyclopropane as an anesthetic on the other hand... particularly with electrocautery pens... I have no idea how they were ever allowed in the same operating room, at least not without some kind of fume hood around the patient's head pulling air rapidly out of the room using a non-arcing fan.
I'm pretty sure they don't cut you open on nitrous oxide (that and...that stuff just wasn't nitrous). Was it TCE? I don't know, nor do I really care. What's done is done, and worrying about it isn't going to change anything. My reaction is more to the fact that there were just not a lot of fucks given back then. Rivers were open sewers, lead was in gasoline even when it was known to be a bad idea, and we put solvents in children's anesthesia.