Nobody should ever wake up during surgery. It should never happen.  Keith David Cooley’s novella - Comatose: The Stuff of Nightmares - is the story of an ordinary man who wakes up during surgery and takes an extraordinary journey.

    For most people taking general anesthesia is a routine experience: they lose consciousness and then wake up once the surgery is complete with no memory of what happened. A very small number of people under general anesthesia experience dreams so vivid that they appear real. A rarer occurrence is a condition called Anesthesia Awareness or unintended intra-operative awareness.

    According to Wikipedia Anesthesia awareness, or unintended intra-operative awareness occurs during general anesthesia, on the operating table, when the patient has not been given enough of the general anesthetic or analgesic to render the patient unconscious during general anesthesia (often when agents used to paralyze the patient have been administered). In brief, it is the post-operative recall of intra-operative events.

    “When I wrote this story I imagined the condition of Anesthesia Awareness I had no idea it existed. It was only during the final preparation of the novella that I uncovered the existence of this condition.” Keith David Cooley said.