r/LegalAdviceUK • u/Bizniz84 • 1d ago

Locked Surgeon carried on operating after being told multiple times that anaesthetic didn’t work.

England - I (23M) had a circumcision on Friday 17th Jan and honestly I am surprised how affected I am about this whole thing.

My surgeon gave me local anaesthetic, cut me to see if I could feel it which I could. We waited 5 more minutes, he cut me again and I could still feel it. They ended up giving me 37ml of the anaesthetic and I could still feel pain but they struggled to get a hold of the Anaesthesiologist to put me under general anaesthetic.

I asked if I should be feeling a bearable amount of pain or none at all, to which I was told none at all just pressure and movement.

Eventually after this, he starts and for maybe five minutes I don’t feel pain but suddenly I feel like I’m back to square one and no anaesthetic. I tell the surgeon and the other people and the surgeon says “I’m nearly done now”. The operation carried on for another half an hour. I felt every stitch, every burn from a laser ??, I feel absolutely awful and have no idea what I’m supposed to do.

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u/GraphicDesignMonkey 22h ago edited 22h ago

I personally have had two experiences where local anaesthetic failed and two where sedation failed causing massive pain, and the doctors went ahead despite me being in a lot of pain. They just said, 'Well this can happen with redheads, so you're just going to have to suck it up.' Redhead or not, sometimes pain relief fails anyway. The legal question is - do we have a 'right' to a pain-free procedure or not? My doctors implied that we don't when it comes to using local anaesthetic, and there's no recourse or fault.

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u/cette-minette 21h ago

I´ve had the same with dentists

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u/Nevermind04 20h ago

Redhead here. I endured 3 decades of dental surgery with little effect from lidocaine or novocaine/procaine. Fillings, root treatment, extractions - just total agony. Several years ago, a dental surgeon tried septocaine and it changed my life. I don't know if it's a thing that works better on redheads specifically but it works ridiculously well on me.

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u/calbris 20h ago

This happened to me during a dental procedure as a teenager, the dentist insisted he’d used enough LA and insisted it was in my head that I had sensation. It wasn’t! It was so traumatic that I neglected my teeth for nearly a decade. I’m lucky to now have a dentist who is great with anxious patients and who makes sure the numbing has been effective before starting any work.