How many days will it hurt for your baby to have a lumbar puncture?

Lumbar puncture is a surgery to extract certain fluids from the lumbar tissue. This surgery is very painful and it applies to a wide range of patients. Both adults and children can undergo lumbar puncture, but after the surgery we will experience many symptoms, of which pain is the most common one. This is a symptom that exists for a certain period of time. So how many days will the baby feel pain during a lumbar puncture?

Lumbar puncture, the abbreviation of lumbar puncture, is a commonly used examination method in medicine. It is a process of extracting a certain amount of fluid - "cerebrospinal fluid" - from the gap between the patient's spine (keel) for clinical use.

To be honest, lumbar puncture is indeed a bit painful, but it is not unbearable. The pain is not much stronger than the needle pain from blood drawing or infusion. Some parents have some knowledge about lumbar puncture and know that local anesthesia is not required for lumbar puncture in infants and young children, but they do not understand this. In fact, local anesthesia also requires acupuncture, and a skin mound is made under the skin, and then the anesthetic is injected layer by layer. This process is also somewhat painful, and it is equivalent to causing a small trauma before lumbar puncture. Therefore, in order to alleviate the baby's pain, oral sedatives (usually chloral hydrate) are given before lumbar puncture, and the procedure is performed after the baby is calm or asleep.

When performing a lumbar puncture, it will damage some soft tissues of the lumbar spine, such as the ligaments of the waist, but these injuries are relatively minor and the needle hole is very small, so they will gradually recover after a period of time.

When the child underwent lumbar puncture, the lumbar puncture needle damaged the peripheral nerve endings. This is okay and will heal in a few days. This is a result of injury. It is recommended that the child take some vitamin B1 and drink more water.

Lumbar puncture requires local anesthesia. The child will not feel pain within five or six hours after the puncture due to the effect of the local anesthetic. The next day, the anesthetic metabolism disappears and there will naturally be pain at the puncture site. This is a very normal situation and does not require treatment. It will be healed in two days.

If there is no redness or swelling around the puncture site and the possibility of infection at the puncture site is ruled out, this may be a normal reaction caused by local inflammatory edema after puncture, which compresses the surrounding tissues.