Recent myocardial infarction carries a risk of fatal infarction following anesthesia. Risk of reinfarction declines to near normal when six months or more have elapsed between original infarct and anesthesia. Emergency procedures carry a much higher mortality rate during the recovery period. Mortality rates probably rise during the evening and night when fewer nurses are present, and during shift changes. Persistent myoneural blockage and relative anesthetic overdose are commonly associated with post-anesthesia mortality 8.
Human error is associated with most disasters unless concurrent disease states dominate.
Risk of postoperative anesthetic-related death diminishes when the patient is not transferred from one unit of a hospital to another until he is fully awake. 10 Anesthetic risk is probably inversely proportional to the number of cases done by each anesthetist in a given day and inversely proportional to the ratio of recovery room nurses to occupant. Obviously these relationships vary with the seriousness of the patient's condition. One nurse might care for three or four healthy individuals undergoing relatively routine surgery or she might be incapable of taking care of more than one especially demanding situation. We can count ourselves fortunate in having recovery rooms.