Pam @pb50, You provided an excellent description of the changes you've experienced. Was your surgery very recent? From what you wrote I figure the surgery occurred within the last month or two.

My partner had surgery in both hands for Dupuytren's contracture. The surgeries were a few years apart. He had a nerve block for the first surgery. For the second surgery the nerve block did not "take" so the anesthesia was converted to a general anesthesia. This is a good discussion to have with your hand orthopedic surgeon given your experience with the pulmonary surgery.

Before I retired much of my scholarly work was in the area of cognitive function in older adults. I might add that I started this work when I was in my 30's and now I am one of those "older adults" at age 71. General anesthesia indeed can and does affect the retrieval of words. As you know it is common as we get older to have difficulty retrieving proper names such as the names of people or places or titles. However, I'd like to validate that you've described a word retrieval difficulty that is not typical. I was often frustrated with neurologists and other physicians who passed off these word retrieval difficulties following general anesthesia. After all, if the surgery was successful for say, open heart surgery or the lung surgery that you experienced then their work is done with the exception of the followups.

You've received some good advice here from @windyshores and @casey1329 who suggest that it can take months for naming function to return. In the meantime I'd like to make a suggestion. If you aren't already doing this, you could chart your observations each day. This could get laborious if you chart every naming difficulty you experience so perhaps just chart with a scale of 0-5 on the difficulty you experience each day with 0 being no difficulty and 5 being extremely difficult. If you have a column for a few examples then that's even better. I have found that when I have written records that I can bring to my physician they are often very willing to take a serious look through my charts.

One last question. When you have the naming difficulty, can you bring to mind the first sound (letter), or the number of syllables of the word? If you let the word "go" does it come to you later? If the answer is yes, then this means that you have retrieved the word but it's "stuck" in the lexical (vocabulary) stream and it's on the "tip of your tongue". That's also good information which means that the word isn't lost but rather stuck.

OK - perhaps this is too much information or detail. I'm very happy for you that your lung nodule was followed closely and eventually removed. Will you let me know about the progress of your recovery?