I am in dire need of back and ankle surgery, but I don't ever want to go under anesthesia again. When I had emergency surgery on my cervical spine years ago, I

I am in dire need of back and ankle surgery, but I don't ever want to go under anesthesia again. When I had emergency surgery on my cervical spine years ago, I nearly died during the process of waking from anesthesia. As I was waking, I had a swarm of nurses yelling over me that I'm not breathing and my heart rate being dangerously high. They kept yelling for me to breathe, but I could barely understand their words due to the anesthesia grogginess, let alone force some biological function that should be involuntary to occur. After several injections of god knows what into my IV line and several minutes of frantic people gathering around me trying to figure out how to keep me from dying, I luckily started stabilizing. From that moment on though, my heart has never been the same. I developed an arrhythmia which they intially told me was due to the anesthesia and should go away within a week, but it has never gone away. Pre-surgery I had a stable idle heart rate - around 65 bpm - and now it fluctuates randomly between 50 and 115 every minute; again that's just sitting and doing nothing. My holter monitor tests showed many many episodes of both tachycardia and bradycardia as well as PVCs and PACs (palpitations). I've been looking into "awake" surgeries lately for my back, so hopefully that will be a reasonable option for most things in the near future.