I'll admit it - I'm addicted to those shows on the Discovery Health channel. "Addicted to Plastic Surgery," "Mermaid Baby," "Medical Incredible"... I eat that stuff up with a fork. So naturally I had to watch "When Anesthesia Fails" and I was subsequently frightened out of my gourd. The show documented a phenomenon (for lack fo a better word) called "anesthesia awareness," which basically means that during surgery the paralysis part of the anesthesia kicks in but the who part about not feeling pain? Yeah, not so much. These people are, for all intents and purposes, awake during surgery. They feel every slice of the scalpel but are unable to move, speak or in any way alert the medical team that they are, in fact, awake. Just listen to this excerpt: "She struggled to open her eyes. She tried to move a finger or make some kind of noise so they would know she was awake. But the anesthesia had paralyzed every muscle in her body. She heard the surgeon ask for a scalpel. 'In my head, I was screaming, Don't cut me! Give me something! But I wasn't making any sound at all. Then I felt him cut me. I could feel the layers of tissue coming apart. It felt like someone had punched a blowtorch into my stomach and turned it on.'" Uh, YEAH...not fun. So of course this is a great idea for a horror movie. And now I bring you to the reason why Jessica Alba is looking hot in a bikini in the right-hand corner of your screen. She and Hayden Christensen have signed on to the thriller AWAKE for the Weinstein Co. Producer Joana Vicente promises, "this film will do to surgery what JAWS did to swimming in the ocean." Yikes. Filming on AWAKE is scheduled to begin this October in New York.
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6:48PM on 09/02/2005