'I felt everything': Woman wakes up during surgery, endures 90 minutes of 'pure torture'

Donna Penner remembers the day 11 years ago like it was yesterday.

"I remember the nurse wheeling me in and saying, 'Don't worry, we're going to take good care of you,'" she said.

Penner went to a hospital near her home in Canada for exploratory surgery to find the root of her severe abdominal pain.

"I remember them taking me to the OR," she said.

And then, she went under.

"They put a mask on my face and told me to take a deep breath," she remembered.

But, approximately 10 minutes later, Penner woke up.

"I remember them scrubbing my abdomen and I thought, 'Well, they're just cleaning up after the surgery,'" she said.

That's when the nightmare began.

"The next thing I heard was the surgeon speak up and ask for the scalpel," she said. "I felt him make the first incision into my abdomen."

Penner was awake, but couldn't move or talk because she was given a paralytic drug in addition to general anesthesia.

"I felt everything, everything," she said. "The pain was absolutely horrific. I wanted to scream. I tried to scream."

She said the agony lasted 90 minutes.

"It was extremely traumatic. And the pain, you know, 90 minutes of what I call pure torture," Penner said.

Ty Bullard, associate professor of anesthesiology at UNC's School of Medicine, knows what it's like from a doctor's perspective to a have a patient aware during surgery.

"It's crushing as a physician," he said.

While completing his residency in Texas, Bullard had a female patient wake up.

"We recognized about 40 minutes into that operation that the amount of the anesthetic being delivered was inadequate," he said.

"When she woke from that anesthetic in the operating room, she immediately notified us that she was awake and experienced some of the more painful experiences of that operation."

Bullard said the incident changed him.

"It created a period of very deep introspection as far as my own career was concerned," he said.

Bullard now teaches others about intraoperative awareness, or anesthesia awareness, as it's more commonly called.

"We need to make sure our trainees, young physicians, as well as our practicing physicians recognize that this problem exists, that it's probably more common than they anticipate," he said.

Research shows one to two patients per 1,000 experience some level of awareness when they're not supposed to.

"It's very important for us to validate a patient's experience, to listen, to apologize where appropriate -- and it often is appropriate for any bad outcome," Bullard said.

She now encourages his colleagues and their patients to have honest and open discussions.

"It is fair (for patients) to ask of anesthesiologists and other providers of anesthesia what steps they plan to take to try to minimize the risk of awareness," he said.

She also has pre-op advice for any patient going under general anesthesia:

"My number one question is make sure you ask your anesthesiologist if they're going to be in the room at all times, and their answer should always be 'Yes,'" Penner said.

Penner was silenced on the operating table

"I couldn't even move my eyes back and forth," she said. "I tried to make tears."

"I thought the whole time that I was dying because the pain was just that intense."

Penner now tells her story to medical students to teach them about anesthesia awareness.

"Just imagine being paralyzed on the table, your heart rate is up as if you're going for a good run or something and somebody's cutting you and you can't do a thing about it," she said.

Penner says she went into distress on the table.

"I was literally suffocating, and I could hear the nurse on one side of me yelling at me, 'Breathe, Donna. Breathe, breathe,'" Penner said.

Penner believes she actually had an out-of-body experience.

"I left my body ... I can still hear what was going on in the room but I couldn't hear it as clearly. It was like it was far, far away, the noises," she described.

Penner doesn't believe she went to heaven, but she says she felt a calming presence.

"I prayed. And he was holding my hand and it got really, I was warm. I felt safe. I was not afraid, there was absolutely no fear, it was good," she said.

She said she quickly returned to her body. When the paralytic drugs wore off, she met with her surgeon.

"And I said, 'Have you noticed that I haven't asked you what your diagnosis was?' And he looked at me for a moment and said, 'You already know don't you?' and I said 'Yes, I do,’” Penner said.

Her surgeon was floored.

Penner also met with her anesthesiologist and told him what she'd experienced.

"And his reaction is something that I still struggle with all these years later. He shrugged his shoulders and he said it happens sometimes. Then, he turned and walked out of the OR and that was all he said," she said. "Right then and there I felt, I felt like I was nothing. I didn't matter, my life didn't matter, he didn't care."

It took six years and a lawsuit before she finally got an apology, but Penner said she has never gotten what she wanted most.

"I wanted answers and ... to this day we still don't know why it happened because no one will tell us," she said.

Linda Stone, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, said in a written statement to WRAL News that in the U.S., certified registered nurse anesthetists and anesthesiologists are required by professional codes of ethics, standards, and guidelines to remain with a patient under anesthesia at all times.

Aanesthesia care in the U.S. is extremely safe and the incidence of awareness under general anesthesia is very low, she said.

She said also that anesthesiologists are not the primary direct patient care providers in most settings. In fact, certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) are the direct anesthesia patient care providers for more than 45 million anesthetics in the United States each year, according to Stone.

There are approximately 53,000 CRNAs in the United States who safely administer anesthesia every day in every setting in which anesthesia is delivered. In North Carolina, approximately 3,400 CRNAs are the individuals administering anesthesia to patients each day in most practice settings and are the primary providers of anesthesia care in over 90 percent of North Carolina rural hospitals.

She said in North Carolina, CRNAs practice in collaboration with surgeons, podiatrists, dentists, and anesthesiologists and are regulated by the North Carolina Board of Nursing.

The primary interest of CRNAs is to ensure that all patients undergoing all types of surgical procedures receive the highest quality anesthesia care, Stone said, adding that they meet patients in the pre-op holding areas and provide continuous anesthesia care until patients are safely delivered to the post-anesthesia recovery unit.