--complete with the frutiless jabs by technicians trying to find the canal, etc., it ended with me being brought down to radiology and the procedure being done under floroscopy. They wre able to quickly find the proper place to stick, numbed the area, drained the fluid (which they never found anything in, BTW); whole thing was over in 15 minutes.

Since the previous attempts had been such a pain, literally, in the you-know-where, I asked the staff why everyone didn't have the puncture done by flousocopy. The answer, of course, was money--insurance doesn't like to pay for the additional cost of the imaging and the people doing it.

Later, I gave the insurance companies an earful about the whole thing, along with others, as an example of penny wise/pound foolish--if they had started with the procedure under floroscopy, I wouldn't have been in the hospital as long, as they wouldn't have had to pay for that.

Glad to hear the Alan had no trouble with the procedure; let's see if they learn anything diagnostically from his fluid. It's possible, given his blood results, they may see a similar increase in his IgG synthesis there, but that probably won't be diagnostic of anything specific. The fact that they said it was clear is a good sign, doubtful there's any blood or infection in it.

Hope Dr. Goldfarb has all the results in 10 days; if they're trying to culture bacteria, sometimes full results take a little longer than that. But any autoimmune analysis should be done in that time.