Anesthesia is what keeps you from feeling pain during medical procedures or surgery. Different types of anesthesia work in different ways. Anesthesia can help control your breathing, blood pressure, blood flow, heart rate and heart rhythm. Anesthesia may be used to:
- Relax you and block your pain
- Make you feel sleepy or forgetful
- Render you unconscious for surgery
Other medicines may be used along with anesthesia to help you relax or to reverse the effects of anesthesia.
There Are Several Types of Anesthesia
- Local anesthesia: This numbs a small part of the body for minor procedures. It also allows you to stay awake during these procedures.
- Regional anesthesia: This blocks pain to a larger part of your body. Types of regional anesthesia include peripheral nerve blocks to block pain around a specific nerve or group of nerves. Blocks are often used on the hands, arms, feet, legs, or face.
- Epidural and spinal anesthesia: This type of anesthetic is applied near the spinal cord and the nerves that connect to it to block pain from an entire region of the body, such as the stomach, hips or legs.
- General anesthesia: This type affects your brain and the rest of your body. It may be given through a vein (IV), or you may breathe it in through a mask. You will be unconscious, and you won’t feel pain during your surgery. Intravenous remifentanil, for example, does not interfere with the quality and number of oocytes retrieved, and makes collecting oocytes easier since women do not feel pain during the procedure.
For egg retrieval, we use a propofol-based anesthesia rather than general anesthesia. This intravenous sedation medication ensures that you feel no pain during egg retrieval.
