An anesthetic cream called EMLA can help reduce the pain of some needle sticks used to draw blood or to access a port, bone marrow puncture site, or lumbar puncture site. The area will be numb for around four hours. EMLA is not used for needle stick sites used to give some kinds of chemotherapy, because its effect makes it hard to ensure that the chemotherapy is going into the vein. A pain-control technique used especially for children is conscious sedation . In other words, the child is drowsy but can breathe well on his own and follow commands.
Conscious sedation is done by combining several medicines to achieve the desired effect.
The medicines are given by mouth, or by IV if the child has a long-term catheter in place. The goal is to avoid the pain of needle sticks and the anxiety caused by the procedure. When a child is especially nervous or anxious, or where a painful procedure can be expected to take longer than about fifteen minutes, conscious sedation might be used to control the child's pain and anxiety. At one respected children's hospital, about one of every eight children getting spinal taps is thought to need conscious sedation. In this hospital, a spinal tap usually takes less than fifteen minutes.