Glossary

The people, places, and terms you will hear on an anesthesia rotation, defined the way we use them in the course. Skim it before day one; nobody expects you to memorize it.

Anesthesiologist: A physician who completed a four-year residency in anesthesiology after medical school. Leads the anesthetic plan and manages the patient's physiology through surgery.
CRNA (Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist): An advanced practice nurse with graduate training in anesthesia. In many ORs a CRNA delivers the anesthetic at the head of the bed, often in a care team with an anesthesiologist.
PA (Physician Assistant / Physician Associate): A licensed clinician who practices medicine in collaboration with physicians. Some anesthesia teams include anesthesiologist assistants (AAs), a related role specific to anesthesia care.
Attending: The fully trained, supervising physician responsible for the case. On a teaching service, the attending oversees residents and students.
Resident: A physician in specialty training after medical school. An anesthesia resident is a doctor learning the specialty under attending supervision.
Circulating nurse: The nurse who runs the operating room from outside the sterile field: charting, fetching supplies, counting instruments, and coordinating the room.
Scrub tech: The team member gowned and gloved at the instrument table, passing instruments to the surgeon. Everything on that table is sterile. Do not touch it.
OR (operating room): The room where surgery happens. It has a geography: the sterile field around the patient and instrument table, the anesthesia workstation at the head of the bed, and the space where you can safely stand.
Pre-op: Short for pre-operative: the area where patients wait before surgery, and the evaluation the anesthesia team performs there. The plan for the whole case is born in this visit.
PACU (Post-Anesthesia Care Unit): The recovery room. A monitored unit where patients wake up after anesthesia, watched by specialized nurses until they are stable enough to leave. Pronounced PACK-you.
ASA physical status: A one-through-six scale describing how sick a patient is before surgery, from ASA I (healthy) to ASA IV (a constant threat to life), plus ASA V (not expected to survive without the operation) and ASA VI (organ donation after brain death). An E after the number means emergency.
Mallampati score: A quick airway assessment made by looking into an open mouth. Class I shows the soft palate, pillars, and whole uvula; class IV shows only the hard palate. Higher classes suggest a potentially harder intubation.
NPO (nil per os): Latin for nothing by mouth. Fasting before anesthesia lowers the risk of aspiration. The commonly quoted minimums: clear liquids two hours, breast milk four, a light meal six, a fatty meal eight or more.
Aspiration: Stomach contents entering the lungs. Anesthesia relaxes the reflexes that normally prevent this, which is why fasting status changes the plan.
Induction: The transition from awake to anesthetized, usually with intravenous medication. One of the two most critical moments of a case. The other is emergence.
Maintenance: The long middle of the case, when anesthesia is kept steady while the operation proceeds. For a student, this is the best window to ask questions.
Emergence: Waking the patient up at the end of surgery, deliberately and in a controlled sequence. The airway stays the priority until the patient is truly awake.
Intubation: Placing an endotracheal tube through the vocal cords into the trachea to secure the airway, usually with a laryngoscope to see the cords.
ETT (endotracheal tube): A cuffed tube that sits inside the trachea, below the vocal cords. The most secure airway device on the ladder.
LMA (laryngeal mask airway): A device with a soft elliptical cuff that sits over the laryngeal inlet, above the vocal cords, without entering the trachea. A middle rung between a face mask and an endotracheal tube.
Laryngoscope: The lighted instrument used to lift the tongue and see the vocal cords during intubation. Video versions put the view on a screen.
Capnography: The continuous measurement of exhaled carbon dioxide. The waveform confirms air is actually moving in and out of the lungs, breath by breath.
Pulse oximeter: The finger probe that measures oxygen saturation, and the source of the beeping tone in the OR. The pitch of each beep falls as saturation falls.
Regional anesthesia: Numbing a region of the body instead of anesthetizing the whole brain. Two families: neuraxial (near the spinal cord) and peripheral nerve blocks (at a specific nerve in a limb).
Neuraxial: The family of blocks placed near the spinal cord: spinals and epidurals. Placed under sterile conditions with the patient sitting curled forward or lying on their side.
Spinal: A single injection into the cerebrospinal fluid. Small volume, works within minutes, dense and reliable, and wears off on its own schedule.
Epidural: An injection that stops short of the spinal fluid, in the epidural space, usually leaving a thin catheter behind. Slower to set up than a spinal, but adjustable and long-lasting.
CSE (combined spinal-epidural): Both at once: the fast dense block of a spinal, plus a catheter left in the epidural space for everything after.
Nerve block: Local anesthetic placed around a specific nerve or bundle, usually under ultrasound guidance, so a shoulder or a knee wakes up not hurting yet.
Sterile field: Any prepped and draped area, plus the gowned people and instrument tables around it. The rule for students: never touch anything draped in blue or green, and ask before you touch anything at all.
Handoff: The structured report the anesthesia provider gives the recovery nurse: who the patient is, what was done, what anesthetic was used, what happened, and what to watch for. One to two minutes, densely packed.
Emergence agitation: Brief confusion or restlessness while waking from anesthesia, more common in children. The team rules out look-alike causes first: pain, low oxygen, a full bladder.