The description of the feeling of burning is unreal! What is even better is the incredible knowledge of how to revive a patient from this state.
I belief these techniques are used in heart bypass operations ?
The blood is taken out of your body through the femoral vein (under the skin between your hip and your nether regions), taken through the perfusion machine and pumped back into the femoral artery. Because at this stage the heart will have been stopped, the high pressure in the femoral artery makes blood flow backwards up the aorta, where it supplies oxygenated blood from the machine to the whole body.
At one stage the flow has to be switched off in order to sew the metal valve onto the top of the aorta. In preparation for this, the blood leaving the perfusion machine is chilled (I'm not sure to what temperature). This slows the body's metabolism down and would cause hypothermic stupor if the patient had not already been under anaesthetic. I was told by the perfusionist that this gave the surgeons around an hour of extra operating time before the brain's oxygen content dropped to dangerous levels. All this is of course monitored by the anaesthetist and the perfusionist. The hypothermia will be reversed during the process of reviving the patient.
With the advent of endovascular procedures, this sort of surgery is becoming a rarity. It's much easier to pass a small tube up the aorta and inflate the narrowed artery from the inside than it is to open up the chest and sew a new blood vessel onto the heart. Of course, the medicine's more boring but it's all about getting a good outcome for the patient, isn't it?
This to repair an ascending aortic dissection that terminates in my left iliac.
I walked out of the hospital, but the recovery was a PITA.
My core temp got down to 18C (65-66F) for over an hour. (According to the surgical notes I was on the heart lung machine for over 4 hours, and without perfusion for 45 minutes.)
Whole thing is here, http://aorticdissection.com/2011/12/06/jim-thompson-47/ though I assumed that the termination was the right iliac until last Spring, when I had them run a CT on the lower extremities, and found that the termination was in my left leg (and that the false lumen had blocked the iliac in my right leg.)
Maybe when you're a doctor you'll remember, "When the symptoms don't make sense, think dissection" and save someone else.
Those heated blankets they have in post-surgery rooms are very nice...
WRT the hypothermia, you may have been slightly hypothermic as a result of having so much of your body surface exposed to the air. People don't realise that ambient temperature (18-22C) is actually quite cold in relation to body temperature (36.7C) - it's only the fact that we wear clothes that means we don't feel it.
Nowadays we have heated blankets in theatre too, to offset this heat loss.