Brains are strange

[Chad ochoseis]

So, I had a tooth pulled yesterday morning under general anesthesia. Everything went well though now, a bit over 24 hours later, I'm still feeling a little tired and loopy. And the right side of my face looks like I've stuffed it with acorns.

Now, that part isn't what's weird. The weird part is that about an hour after I woke up from the anesthesia, I sent my girlfriend money to pay her credit card bill. But I have no memory at all of doing this. The only way I know is that I have an email telling me I did it, and my girlfriend confirmed that yes, I sent her the money.

I was going to do this anyway - with SAG on strike, she hasn't been able to get acting gigs and with school out, she hasn't been able to get substitute teaching gigs, so I've been covering her bills and we'd discussed how much she needed on Wednesday.

But somehow, I was lucid enough yesterday morning to:

- get to my bank's website
- remember my user name and password
- find Zelle on the site and send my girlfriend the money
- in the exact amount she owed, to the dollar

...while not being lucid enough to remember doing any of this.

Has something similar ever happened to any of you? I'm finding it strange and just a bit scary that I could be able to perform a set of complex tasks and not be able to remember doing so just a few hours later.

[MFS62]

The closest I can come up with was when I went to a Holiday party given by a professor at college. Let's just say I was more than a little tipsy when I left.
It was on the upper west side of Manhattan. I had to take two subway trains (switching from IND to IRT) and a bus and then walk three blocks to get to my home to Queens, then take the elevator to the right floor.
I woke up in my bed the next day and didn't remember how I got there.

Later

[Chad ochoseis]

I occasionally hear stories like that, but I'm not much of a drinker and have never blacked out from booze.

But you had to get home somehow, obviously, and you'd taken that route before. What's really weird to me is that I thought about doing this when I wasn't really thinking at all, I didn't have to do it at that time, and that I remembered the correct amount I needed to send. But it was completely purged from my memory an hour later.

[Edgy MD]

I came out of general anesthesia from a wisdom tooth extraction, some years back. I opened my eyes and started busting a chat and noticed my wife was kind of smiling at me like I was pathetically cute, and her responses felt a bit patronizing. More than a bit, to be honest.

I asked what gives, and she told me that while I was under, the practitioner told her that I wouldn't remember anything from the first hour or two after I woke up. I told her that I certainly will remember everything, and if she's going to talk to me like I'm a drooling two-year-old, she can be certain I'll remember it until the day I die. Numbness can apparently make me bold enough to talk shit to my wife, but it didn't have any effect on my memory. I still remember that shit.

[Frayed Knot]

Memory blackouts from alcohol are not so much your inability to remember something as it is the booze interfering with the brain's
ability to create memories in the first place. So you know where to change trains and you can navigate familiar neighborhoods, but
if something happens in that time span -- running into someone you know, talking to a stranger on the way, slipping and skinning
your knee, etc. -- those things will often be lost because they never get 'filed away' in however the brain does that sort of thing so
there's nothing for it to recall later on.
I'm not sure if anesthesia works the same way but logic suggests that it might. So you're not incapable of making the money
transactions, remembering the codes, the passwords, and so on, it's just that no permanent mental record exists of you doing so.

I have no memories of large chunks of time both leading up to and following my heart attack. Hitting the floor probably added a
concussion to the mix which wouldn't help but for instance I have no memory of what my last pre-attack memory was; there's no:
'There I was talking to Joe and suddenly I woke up in the hospital' type of timeline. Afterward I was out for days and in and out
for days more so the internal gray matter clerks were likely on strike for a while there as well, and who knows what kind of shit
they had me on during that whole time but it was certainly more than just local anesthesia.

[MFS62]

you'd taken that route before.

I had never been there before, or anywhere near that house before that night.
There couldn't have been any latent experience to draw on.
Later

[Edgy MD]

My wife tells me that I did a of talking when I woke up from buttocks surgery that I didn't remember. I'm formally denying it. It's true that I don't remember any conversation in post-op, but I'm going with the idea that there simply wasn't any conversation to remember and she's lying through her lying teeth.