Anesthesia and Idiopathic Hypersomnia (IH): A Patient Guide
Because IH is a rare disease, healthcare providers may not be familiar with it. And this could create real problems if you need to have anesthesia for a procedure. Therefore, we’ve prepared a patient guide which addresses anesthesia issues that may arise when a person with IH is facing surgery. This Guide, which can be shared with your medical team, is focused on the anesthesia-related issues that must be considered before, during, and after a procedure (periprocedurally) when you have IH.
Also available in the following languages: Deutsche; Español; Français.
Updated July 2020
Anesthesia Care Plan
We have also created an associated Anesthesia Care Plan, which you can download and then complete with your own personal medical information (with the help of your doctors). This Plan can then be discussed, and shared, with your medical and surgical teams, so that everyone, at every stage of your procedure, is aware of your IH and how your IH symptoms and medications may affect your medical care.
We recommend that you consider working with your doctors to complete an Anesthesia Care Plan to have on hand in case of need for an emergency procedure. In that case, you will want to provide a copy to your emergency contact and/or upload a copy of your document to a secure cloud service, such as Google Drive. Then, so that emergency personnel can access your care plan, you will want to update your medical alert card (and/or smartphone app) with your emergency contact’s phone number and/or the cloud service web address (which you may want to shorten with a free url shortener, like Bitly or TinyURL).
Also available in the following languages: Deutsche; Español; Français.
Updated July 2020
See also our SomnusNooze article introducing this Guide and Plan, as well as other articles related to Surgery & Hospitalization if You Have a Hypersomnia.