Anesthesia Services

Inlet Anesthesia is proud to offer a variety of anesthesia services to meet the needs of the diverse patient population here in the Murrells Inlet area. Our services include:

Pre-Anesthetic Assessment

General Anesthesia

Regional Anesthesia / Acute Pain Management

Obstetric Anesthesia

Pediatric Anesthesia

Critical Care

In preparation for your upcoming surgery, your surgeon will refer you to our pre-anesthesia testing clinic. There you will meet with one of our nurses – they will make sure all the appropriate pre-operative tests get done, and if there are any complicated issues, they will arrange for the anesthesiologist to speak with you. During this visit or the day of the surgery, an anesthesiologist will talk to you before your anesthetic. Taking into consideration all the results from your lab tests, special studies, and overall physical condition, an anesthetic technique will be discussed with you, as well as any alternatives. While the final choice is up to you, we urge you to follow the recommendations of the anesthesiologist.

Many types of anesthetics are available to make you insensible to pain during surgery. A general anesthetic involves giving you medicines through a vein, and/or having you inhale anesthetic gases. General anesthesia will render you unconscious during surgery. Regional anesthesia is when only a portion of your body is made numb. Examples of regional anesthesia are spinal, epidural, and nerve blocks. Frequently, when a regional anesthetic is used, you may also be given intravenous sedation to keep you pleasantly sleepy during surgery.

Even with improved and advanced surgical techniques, patients will still have some pain and discomfort after surgery. It is important for you to communicate your pain level with the doctors and nurses after your surgery. We at Inlet Anesthesia will strive to make your surgical experience as painless as possible. We offer a wide variety of postoperative pain management services. Utilizing a multi-modal approach including intravenous pain medication, oral medication -both narcotic and non-narcotic, and peripheral nerve blocks, our anesthesia providers keep our patients pain free in the safest way possible. We perform both single shot and continuous catheter ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve blocks which offer many hours of pain control, from 12 hours for the single shots blocks and up to several days for the continuous peripheral nerve catheter blocks. These blocks are especially beneficial after major orthopedic surgeries such as total knee replacements and shoulder/arm surgeries. We also offer intrathecal and epidural narcotic pain medicines to help with pain after surgery on the abdomen. Ask your surgeon and anesthesiologist if you are a candidate for any of these advanced acute pain management services. Your comfort and safety is always our primary concern.

Inlet Anesthesia physicians and CRNAs provide coverage to our laboring moms 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We utilize a wide variety of pain relief services, including spinals, epidurals, and intravenous pain medicines to help our moms tolerate the labor process with as little pain as possible.

We at Inlet Anesthesia realize the anesthetic considerations for children are much different from those for adults. We are sensitive to the special needs of our pediatric patients and their parents. Our anesthesia team enjoys taking care of children, and we will strive to make your child’s anesthesia experience as pleasant as possible.

Critical care medicine, an important and viable subspecialty of anesthesiology represents an important aspect of our practice. The current climate of projected ongoing shortages of physician intensivists combined with the movement to greater acute care services for an aging population with multiple chronic conditions will drive the need for increased multidisciplinary critical care services. Physician anesthesiologists have a long and proud heritage in critical care medicine and must continue to participate at the local, regional and national levels in providing state-of-the-art intensive care to patients of all ages and pathologies. Our Anesthesiologists, although not subspecialty fellowship-trained in critical care, do work closely with pulmonologists and surgeons to provide the critical care services needed in the peri-operative period to the patients of our hospital system.