A 28-year-old English teacher from Russia reportedly stopped speaking Russian for several hours after undergoing a colonoscopy under anesthesia. The Telegram channel Mash reported this, according to infohub.kz.
An anonymous endoscopist told the channel that the man received anesthesia for the first time. After the procedure, he took a long time to come round, and upon waking spoke only English. Doctors spent over an hour trying to bring the patient back to a normal state, then called his wife.
But even with his wife, the man continued speaking English, shouting and trying to explain something. According to Mash, his Russian returned several hours later when the patient said he needed the toilet.
Such cases are indeed described in medical literature, although the phenomenon is considered extremely rare. It is called foreign language syndrome: a person temporarily stops using their native language and starts speaking in a second language they know.
For example, in one reported case, a 17-year-old patient after orthopedic surgery stopped understanding Dutch and communicated only in English for about a day. Later he spoke his native language again.
The exact cause of this reaction is still unknown. One theory is that it may be linked to postoperative delirium — a temporary state of confusion when coming out of anesthesia.
The story described by Mash has not been separately confirmed by a medical publication. It is impossible to establish the cause of the incident from Telegram channel reports.
Earlier, Kursiv Health wrote about whether it is possible to wake up during surgery under anesthesia, and shared stories of people who claim to have had a similar experience.