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Comment by DemocracyFTW2 | Hacker News Reader

as an inhaled surgical anesthetic for children and women in labor

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.

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I had a couple of operations as a youngster, and from my memory (could be faulty) they would speak to you while you were still on the trolley then waft some gas in front of you as you needed to breathe in. Then, when you were sedated they would get on with the business. I guess they would be able to inject you with something a bit more serious without you squirming, and transfer you to the table etc..

LOL, that's the exact opposite of the majority of my experience in the 70s. In your case, you got the gas, then the shot. I'd get the "pre-op" shot for the mild sedation, then the gas for the main event. "Count backward from ten.", and I'd make it to about seven.

Likewise, hernia operation as a small child.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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