I was nervous. My anxiety could not be shaken, for the thought of a biopsy engendered memories of the bone marrow test, a test which I vowed never to take again. What terror had I willfully agreed to undergo this time? It was a relief to hear my name called on the loud speaker; the time I'd spent in the waiting room was of no benefit to my peace of mind. I could think of nothing else but unbridled pain, and mulling over such thoughts tended to have few positive effects. After disrobing and donning a hospital gown, I was led into a waiting room used by other patients and soon began a conversation with an older woman who also had an enlarged liver. Over the fact that she was enlarged I did not argue, however, I could not resist asking myself how much of her enlargement actually had to do with her liver. Whether her mistake was due to self-deceit or a lack of awareness did not matter; concern and uncertainty were two elements we shared, and we wished each other luck as a nurse ushered her from the room. I spent a brief while surveying the floor before I was called. A nurse directed me to a room and instructed me to lay down on a hard examining table, whereupon I was left in darkness for two hours before a doctor arrived. Meanwhile my state of mind deteriorated rapidly as I listened to the sounds emanating from the surrounding rooms. Most were only voices trailing off into the maze of corridors and finally disappearing behind various doors of anonymity. However, with my mind housing its unarrested and nameless fears of the forth-coming biopsy, other sounds were transformed into horrendous tortures, the likes of which I would surely undergo. One such fanciful flight of imagination was set off by the unimpeded verbalizations of an old man whose room was across the hall from my own. Since my door was propped open, I had noticed him sitting in his wheelchair and muttering complaints or idly sucking his gums. Eventually the door closed and his tests began, leaving me to interpret the activity behind the door through his vocalizations. There were garbled grumblings, which I had expected, but then groans replaced words and I began to worry. They were awful. They were the cries of horror shows and nightmares, scaling a full octave and attaining a tonal quality which rivaled professional sound effects. I was impressed; so much, in fact, that my stomach had managed to tie itself into a perfect knot by the time the doctor arrived. I appraised the old man's throaty outbursts as the sound track to a liver biopsy. Luckily I was wrong. Whatever were his trials, whether real or imagined, they prepared me for optimum punishment, to which I was never exposed. Although I was horrified in my solitude and misinformation, perhaps my final opinion of the test's severity was buffered by the old man's wailings.