I would have preferred general anesthesia. So I'm lying there on my back, legs up in stirrups and sucking on a canister of nitrous oxide after swallowing 7 of the 2 mg Valium pills. The doctor and nurses are having a go at my prostate via needles into my perineum while monitoring everything via an anal ultrasound probe, I can control the amount of nitrous and I'm madly sucking away until my vision begins to blur and I don't know if it's possible, but I think maybe I'm inhaling too much of the laughing gas and I might be solving the whole prostate cancer thing right then and there. I back off a little so as not to embarrass everybody (including me) by checking out in that position while they're in the middle of everything. You think maybe that all of this may have had anything to do with my blood pressure being elevated? Anyway, they inserted the three fiducial markers, but when the doc tried to squeeze in the SpaceOAR gel he bailed on the idea as he was getting blood pushing back into the syringe and this apparently bollixed the whole gel spacer deal. So the fall back is I had to use the rectal balloon every day I went in for treatment. Properly placed SpaceOAR gel would have prevented that, but from what I'm reading on it, maybe that's a good deal as the SpaceOAR itself can be a problem for some people. But one think I've learned after 72 years and change is I prefer to be unconscious when in the operating theater.