thanks anthony for raising this issue (& so much other really useful info for us on these pages) of acute respiratory distress, i'd never heard of this & it sounded so similar to my trauma, (suffocation) looked it up. found another article (don't know how to attach it but have it on desktop) called:Article


Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Health-Related Quality of Life in Long-Term Survivors of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Hans P. Kapfhammer, M.D., Ph.D., Hans B. Rothenhäusler, M.D., Till Krauseneck, M.D., Christian Stoll, M.D. and Gustav Schelling, M.D.
it describes patients' experience as 'immediate threat of death by suffocation...this destructive experience is potentiated by the continued limited ability to communicate and the lack of possibilities to flee' - same as during anaesthetic awareness happening during use of paralysing muscle-relaxants.

an article i found recently:

Awareness During Surgery Leaves Emotional Scars
General anesthesia, although an obvious boon to modern surgery, fails to completely knock out a small percentage of patients, many of whom go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder from the pain, horror and helplessness of the experience.
A study of 16 of these so-called "awareness" patients found that more than half of them had PTSD, while none of the 10 patients who were not awake during their surgery developed the psychiatric disorder.
Awareness under general anesthesia is estimated to happen to 0.2 percent to 0.7 percent of surgery patients, affecting between 40,000 and 140,000 patients a year.
"Most post-awareness subjects reported lapsing in and out of consciousness, picking up fragments of the surgery, conversations and bodily sensation while struggling to move, escape and communicate. These memories reappeared later as vivid images, sensations, isolated thoughts and intense emotions that are characteristic of PTSD," says lead author Jane E. Osterman, M.D., M.S., of Boston University School of Medicine.
The subjects in this study reported an inability to communicate during their surgery as well as intense feelings of helplessness, terror, feeling unsafe, fear of pain, pain and paralysis. They also reported that they had felt abandoned or betrayed by their doctors and nurses. Following surgery, the awareness patients continued to suffer from feelings of being unsafe, terror, helplessness, the inability to communicate, betrayal and abandonment.

see how close these 2 are, the anaesthetic awareness & respiratory distress syndrome? interesting, i don't know how frequently this respiratory distress occurs, but i would bet it's far less frequent than anaesthetic awareness, quoted here at 0.2-0.7% of all general anaesthetics, quite a lot of patients (like me) are out here but nobody has heard of it and it is still being denied & covered-up by most hospitals. of course patients need to have faith & confidence in proposed surgery but at what cost? when it does happen (and you wake paralysed, unable to breathe etc with a tube down your throat) not knowing what is happening & why add enormously to the extreme terror you're experiencing. should doctors worldwide warn patients of anaesthetic awareness? (they do in the USA now), should patients be told pre-op that they will have a tube put down their throat, they will be paralysed and they will not be able to breathe for themselves? at present it is extremely rare to tell patients that this will happen during their anaesthetic, would this knowledge put patients off surgery? CAN patients give informed consent to their anaesthetic without this knowledge? just wanted to highlight the fact that a lot of people out here are living with PTSD because of anaesthetic awareness & many are too disturbed to be able to seek/get proper help either with the PTSD or information that could help them understand their trauma. (especially when hospitals deny it ever happened and tell patients it was a 'dream' so patients then think they themselves must be crazy, (very dangerous!). it might be helpful to add anaesthetic awareness to this forum's 'what is traumatic enough for PTSD' as the a/a group is very likely much larger than most people know!