Your Fight / Flight Response is Impaired
Damage to your fight/flight response is what I believe fucks people up the most. This fight/flight response is the hidden side of ETS surgery and has a huge impact on your general well being and how you 'feel'. This damage is completely invisible to others which makes it super easy for doctors to continue getting away with performing this barbaric procedure.
It is also extremely important to note that it is the sympathetic nervous system which activates your fight/flight response. So if the sympathetic nervous system is impaired or damaged, this will have a definite impact on your overall medical health and well being. (Pssst... This is the nerve which is cut during ETS surgery).
But first, let's understand what it is that this fight/flight response mechanism is supposed to do:
The fight/flight response reacts to unexpected changes in our environment, especially threats. This causes the body to speed up and become more tense and alert to maximise our chances of survival in a dangerous situation. Adrenaline and noradrenaline hormones are released into the bloodstream so that we can deal with the threat successfully. This leads to the following physical reactions:
- Our heart rate, blood pressure and breathing speed up.
- Our muscles become tense.
- Fat and sugar are released to provide energy to the muscles. This can also cause trembling.
- Digestion and urine production are put on standby as they’re not needed in this situation.
- Sweating occurs. This keeps the body cool and makes us harder to grab if we’re attacked.
- Our pupils dilate so that more light can enter and we can see the threat more clearly.
- Salivation shuts down, making our mouth feel dry.
- Blood vessels open wide, flooding the skin with blood. This causes our face to redden.
These unpleasant reactions are just our body’s way of preparing us to successfully deal with the threat we’re facing, then the parasympathetic nervous system takes over and restores the body to a sense of calm once the danger has passed. Whereas the sympathetic system reacts immediately, the parasympathetic system takes a while to return our body to a normal state and the stress hormones tend to linger in the blood stream. This is why it can take a few hours to get the body recovered from this exertion and you may well continue to feel stressed and even exhausted during this time.
The Sympathetic Nerve is what Controls your Fight/Flight Response
ETS surgery is performed by cutting the sympathetic nerve which makes up part of our sympathetic nervous system; this very system which is responsible for controlling our Fight/Flight response.
This means that the communication within your body that triggers a fight/flight response is now impaired. As a result,
a few different things may happen. Firstly, these fight/flight reactions can get triggered at the incorrect time. You can be sitting down watching television and all of a sudden your heart starts racing, your begin to breathe heavily, you start trembling, and your body makes all the appropriate physiological changes as if you were about to be attacked by a tiger, for absolutely no reason.
And for many victims of ETS surgery, these responses can be extremely difficult to switch off. And for some, they can't be switched off at all, particularly if the parasympathetic system has been completely disabled. Their body is permanently in this heightened state of alertness and is the reason why so many suffer from body aches and pains, fatigue, headaches and other side effects. It's because their body's can no longer relax.
And for some, this state can become so bad it is unbearable just being awake. You cannot turn it off. And unfortunately, this is the condition which has even led to some ETS patients taking their own life shortly after surgery.
**Need to discuss the opposite effects. No emotions, laughter, zombie state
But luckily for most ETS patients, this heightened state of alertness is quite tolerable, although many still don't know that this is what is actually happening within their bodies. They know they feel weird and that something is definitely not right, but it is extremely difficult to articulate to other people what is going on because so many things are going on all at once. Your clothes are drenched from all the sweat, your body is overheating, you can't pee, your digestion is all over the place, you become fatigued, you now have insomnia and can't sleep properly, and this leads on to the next problem.
You become irritable and an absolute nightmare to be around. And the worst part is NOBODY ELSE UNDERSTANDS.
Nobody else understands what is going on inside your body because 1. you don't even understand yourself, and 2. it is impossible to show anybody else what you are now experiencing. You go to see specialist after specialist to help find out why you are feeling the way you do and all your test results come back normal. What the?
***This bit needs work***
The following is just notes for my own benefit:
Secondly...Many of these functions are disabled completely, including your emotions, and you become a zombie. You can't feel any emotions. You can't be happy, sad, laugh, cry. You just float through life as a complete zombie.
And the reason they come back normal is because your body is now different to what it used to be. They need to be taking into consideration that you have had ETS surgery and not doing the same test that they'd normally do for everybody else. And that's because even they have never heard of ets surgery. How is that possible? How is it that I have had a surgical procedure that nobody has even heard of before?
This can be a very scary, lonely place to be, especially after going back to see your surgeon and finding out there is nothing else he can do to help you. Worse still is when he refuses to see you or take your calls after learning what side-effects you now have. And believe me this happens more than you would think.
Check out this site which discusses the problems this condition can lead to:
https://www.nichd.nih.gov/newsroom/releases/stress