General anesthesia involves medications to blunt pain, block memory, and paralyze the patient, and can lead to rare catastrophic events if a patient feels pain but cannot communicate it.

“General anesthesia typically requires three things. Um, it requires one type of medication uh to to blunt pain. Yeah. Another type of medication to block memory and another type of medication to paralyze you. Now of course if things go wrong and things have gone wrong sometimes patients are paralyzed but they feel pain but they can't communicate it. And these are these catastrophic but fortunately very rare events that occur in anesthesia.”