Wide-Awake Surgery: Featuring Doctors Redler and Douglass

Video Transcript

Wide awake surgery – as the name implies, means that you’re awake. You’re not sedated you are not going under general anesthesia you’re not having a breathing tube – you’re there almost on a one-on-one situation with a surgeon and with the surgical team. You don’t feel anything. He localizes it to where they need to operate on. And in my case it was the trigger finger on my right hand. And it was basically in 20 minutes I was up and out. It’s just incredible. When they come in for surgery they can eat the night before, the day of. They can take their pills any medications they’ve been taking. Really, I tell them that they should look at it as a normal day. Sometimes, I’ve had people come just on their lunch break actually and then go back to work the same day. The ability to spend that time while surgery is going on – furthering that relationship makes the patient know that you don’t just care about their hand in this case, but you also care about them as a person. They feel better – they’re gonna do better.