One valuable thing that came out of my jury experience happened around lunchtime, when I snuck a glance at my absent neighbor's newspaper and discovered awareness during surgery, an absolutely horrid thing that can happen to people when they're improperly anesthetized.

The first thing Sidney L. Williams says he heard when he awoke in the operating room during open heart surgery two years ago was the insistent whine of a bone saw cleaving his sternum. As doctors began discussing his badly damaged heart, Williams wondered whether he was eavesdropping on his own death: The surgeon had warned him before surgery that there was a 50 percent chance he would die on the table. Seconds later, Williams said, he felt jolts of searing pain as the doctor shocked his heart, which had stopped. "I once almost severed two fingers with a table saw," Williams, 56, recalled. "This was much, much worse."

Worst of all, said Williams, who lives in Austin, was his utter helplessness, his inability to let anyone know he was awake. Williams couldn't make a sound: A breathing tube had been snaked down his throat. He couldn't move a muscle: He had been given standard paralytic drugs that rendered him motionless during surgery. And he couldn't cry: His eyes were taped shut and the drugs he was given stopped tear production.

"I remember just screaming and screaming, 'This is killing me,' but it was only in my head," Williams recalled. "It was like I was being buried alive."

I am so never having surgery. More from Wikipedia, which says this happens 4000 times a year.