organ donation ( Archived) (23)

I'm so messing up the link, but there are papers explaining the use of anaesthesia when removing donor organs.

Brain death from which there is 100% certainty of no recovery doesn't exclude some autonomic function from spinal nerve activity. Anaesthesia and other medications are in part used for physical convenience (reflex muscle movements, blood spurting during surgery) and in part for psychological reasons: surgery just using muscle relaxants is counter-intuitive and uncomfortable for anaesthetists, blood spurting and reflex movements may be distressing for surgical teams and the use of anaesthesia increases confidence in the donor programme for members of the public. Anaesthesia is comforting for the living, but not necessary for the dead.

Having had a near death experience following the failure of anaesthesia, I stopped feeling anything when I saw the death lights, but before my heart stopped, or I had lost 'internal' consciousness. If you're in more pain than you can handle: 1. everything shuts down and you die; 2. you get flooded with endorphins which is very pleasant. In short, being sliced open while you're alive is short-lived even when you're fighting fit and fully conscious, never mind brain stem dead.

And if that's not enough, clearly anaesthetics don't always work anyway. My experience is not unique by any stretch of the imagination.