Postoperative analgesia for patients undergoing major abdominal surgery, such as hepatectomy, liver transplantation, or Whipple's Surgery is an issue of debate in the anesthetic society. While epidural analgesia is widely accepted as the best method for postoperative pain control in most major abdominal surgery, the safety of epidural catheters in patients undergoing liver or pancreatic resections is contested. Postoperative coagulopathy, which develops to an extent in every patient with resection of liver and which is directly correlated to the amount of liver resected, puts the patient at risk of developing a spinal hematoma - particularly with removal of the catheter. Coagulopathy also exists to a degree in patients with pancreatic cancer and obstructive jaundice, therefore the question as to the safety of an epidural catheter in these patients is debatable. As large doses of anesthetic are injected into a relatively vascular area during TAP blocks, there exists the potential for toxicity. Two recent studies have examined serum levels of lidocaine and ropivacaine after TAP block using standard local anesthetic volumes and found serum levels consistent with potential systemic toxicity. However, there is no literature on serum local anesthetic levels during continuous TAP block. Serum lidocaine plasma levels will be measured in patients randomized to receive TAP block with or without intermittent local anesthetic bolusing postoperatively to provide patient safety data for this procedure. OBJECTIVE To determine whether a continuous transversus abdominis plane block run until the third postoperative day will reduce patient postoperative pain scores and reduce the amount of intravenous morphine required for major abdominal surgery and to quantify plasma lidocaine levels. HYPOTHESIS Patients receiving continuous TAP block with lidocaine use less PCA morphine post-operatively compared to patients receiving placebo through TAP catheters. METHODS Following Institutional Ethics Board Approval, forty patients undergoing major abdominal surgery (the number was chosen according to previous similar studies) will be randomly allocated to TAP block with postoperative intermittent infusion of 0.5-1.0% lidocaine versus TAP block with postoperative intermittent infusion of placebo (i.e. saline). All patients will receive a standard general anesthetic and all patients will receive the current postoperative analgesic standard of care in our hospital, which is an intravenous morphine PCA pump combined with adjunctive medication. The presence and severity of pain, sedation and nausea will be assessed by an investigator blinded to group allocation. These assessments will be done by one of the investigators at 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours after the TAP blockade. Pain will be assessed at rest and on movement using the visual analogue score. Sedation scores shall be assigned to awake or alert=0, quietly awake=1, asleep but easily aroused=2, deep sleep=3. Sedation will be defined as the presence of sedation score greater than 0 at any time point. Nausea will be defined by the administration of rescue antiemetics. Morphine requirements at 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours will be assessed for all patients. Also we will evaluate any extra medication a patient may have required, time to first bowel movement, time to first mobilization, discharge date, and any complications such as wound infection, ileus, local anesthetic toxicity, or catheter dislocation. All patients who have a unilateral incision will receive a TAP catheter placed intraoperatively by the surgeon. Under direct visualization, the surgeon will first close the muscle layer of the transversus abdominis.