[Kitsa]

Spinal taps I've had aplenty, and they're not that bad. In my opinion, the worst part of a spinal tap is the vulnerability. There's a bad moment of anxiety as your back is swabbed and you feel the paper shield being affixed. There's a slight stinging sensation from a superficial anesthetic shot, the old "bee sting". The actual tap doesn't hurt, but you can feel the sensation of the needle in your intervertebral space and that's definitely unpleasant and oogy. That's the second part of the procedure I dislike.

The third comes about half an hour to two hours afterward, when you may or may not get an excruciating headache. Mine have always been in my forehead and you feel like if you could just shove your head into something hard enough, the pain might be relieved. Sometimes it makes you puke. But it eventually goes away.

Having had the unpleasant honor of comparing the two, I can tell you that it's not nearly as big a thing to fear as a bone marrow aspiration.

I've had enough big bad tests to know the warning signs that things will get ugly.

1) If they tell you that you might feel "discomfort", it will be unpleasant. If they tell you that it'll be "unpleasant", it'll hurt. If they tell you it'll "hurt", it will hurt like hell.

2) The more people in the room that are necessary for the procedure, the worse it will be for the patient. If there are non-nurse techs present, they know something about holding you down that you haven't seen coming.

3) Wrapped surgical bundles fresh from the autoclave are never a good sign if you think you're going in for an easy little test.

4) A big audience of physicians is a bad sign. You're essentially having something done where a physician, who reckons his or her time as infinitely valuable, is stopping everything else to say, "I gotta see this."

5) If the diagnostic has to be carried out by no less a personage than a physician, that's a bad sign.

6) If there's a crash cart suspiciously wheeled into the room or fresh suction tubing has been unsheathed and prepped, that's a bad sign.

I'd go on at length with horror stories, but I think I'd end up sounding like one of those cartoon guys at the fishermen's bar with peg legs and arms.

Colonel Flagg: Exactly.