When a balanced anesthesia drug protocol has been utilized most of our patients will wake up smoothly from general anesthesia. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, there will be times when a patient wakes up and displays a rough recovery.

When the vaporizer is turned on to a certain percentage the patient does not immediately see that concentration of inhalant in their brain. For that inhalant concentration to be seen in the patient's brain the inhalant must diffuse across several partial pressure gradients.

Dead space volume is the volume of gas that does NOT participate in gas exchange (e.g., there is no exchange between O2 and CO2). No matter what we do from an anesthesia standpoint there will always be some degree of dead space present in our patients.