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Donna Penner, a 44-year-old woman from Manitoba, Canada, decided to visit her doctor when she’d begun experiencing heavy bleeding during her periods. Her doctor was able to give her a precise diagnosis, so he proposed having her undergo an exploratory laparoscopy so he could better investigate the problem.
A laparoscopy requires the surgeon to make incisions into a patient’s abdomen. The surgeon then pushes instruments through these incisions to investigate the patient’s internal organs.
Penner agreed to the procedure. She’d undergone procedures that required general anesthetic before, so she assumed this one would simply be the same. Even so, when she got to the hospital on the day of the procedure, she felt incredibly anxious for some reason.
As doctors prepared Penner for the operation, everything went smoothly. She was on the operating table, they were hooking her up to the machines, and then the anesthesiologist gave her something via IV and placed a mask over her face to allow her to go to sleep.
Penner did.
And then she woke up.
At first, she thought the operation was over. She could hear the sounds of the operating room, like the machines and monitors humming around her, but she thought the surgeons were simply cleaning up the room.
Penner relaxed then, grateful that the entire experience was finished. "I was lying there feeling a little medicated, but at the same time I was also alert and enjoying that lazy feeling of waking up and feeling completely relaxed," she recounted in an essay.
"That changed a few seconds later when I heard the surgeon speak. They were moving around and doing their things and then all of a sudden I heard him say, 'Scalpel please.'"
Penner immediately went into a panic.
She wanted to let the surgeon know that she was awake – but the paralytic that had been administered in pre-operation prep was still in effect. They’d given it to her to ensure that her abdominal muscles wouldn’t act up during the procedure, but now it was also keeping her from alerting her doctors.
“I thought this cannot be happening. So I waited for a few seconds, but then I felt him make the first incision,” she wrote. “I don't have words to describe the pain — it was horrific."
She wasn’t able to move, she wasn’t able to speak, and she couldn’t even make tears to cry in pain because the paralytic was keeping her from doing so.
"At that point, I could hear my heart-rate on the monitor: It kept going up higher and higher," Penner recalled. "I was in a state of sheer terror. I could hear them working on me, I could hear them talking. I felt the surgeon make those incisions and push those instruments through my abdomen."
After that point, Penner could hear her surgeons talking amongst themselves. They said things like, “Look at her appendix, it's really nice and pink, colon looks good, ovary looks good.”
The entire incident was a complete nightmare for Penner.
At one point, she realized that she was able to move her foot and tried to wiggle it to signal to her doctors that she was actually awake, but one of her doctors simply put her hand on Penner’s foot. It was almost as if they were simply getting her to stop moving it.
For the next 90 minutes, Penner was forced to endure her surgery, awake.
And the pain wasn’t the worst part.
Because she’d been paralyzed, doctors had also given her a breathing tube for the duration of the procedure. But the oxygen rate of the tube had been set, assuming Penner would be unconscious for the operation.
Penner’s heartrate, however, was racing and she was breathing rapidly, desperate for breath that the machine simply wasn’t giving her.
At that point, Penner was able to move her tongue, so she tried to play with the tube to signal to someone, anyone, that she was awake. And again, this signal was misunderstood by her doctors.
They took it as a sign that she was breathing on her own, so they removed her tube.
Penner could feel herself suffocating. She mentally said her goodbyes to her family as she heard one of the nurses yelling at her, “Breathe, Donna, breathe!”
She went into an out-of-body experience, floating in a minor state of consciousness, before she suddenly snapped back into reality where doctors were putting a manual resuscitator over her mouth to get air back into her lungs.
Now, nine years after the operation, Penner admits she still suffers from PTSD from the incident, even though she physically survived the operation. You can read her full, terrifying account here.
