Clinical Trial Diary - Part One

Screening

I am skint! Seriously. I get paid something like half what I did back in Nottingham and my rent is over twice as much. You do the math... s. It does not look good. Factor into this that I owe James a big whale of cash AND we got a full years worth of Council Tax bill this week. Don't avoid the council. Lesson learned. I wanna go to America next year, and I don't wanna go to Ibiza this year but I'm going anyway because I said I would.

Rack it all up and I need money, is the point. Nick comes to me a week or so back with an idea. Not a new idea mind. We tried this once before. Him in Stafford and me in Leeds. He even wrote a movie about it called Equilibrium [till that Christian Bale ‘Gun-Fu’ movie came out] which is a title I have stolen for my somewhat regular diary of clinical trials.

Yup yup. They don't call it medical testing anymore. Bad press. Sounds like I'm gonna be growing extra things while other things drop off. It's got such bad press, in fact, that my own mother tried to stop me from going ahead with the screening at all. But she didn't follow her objections with a cheque for £2,750, so I ignored her obviously.

That's the pay for this study, by the way. £2,750. All I have to do is show up for a screening [which was today] and if I pass muster then I'm in the study till the start of June. Two sets of overnight stays [3 days 2 nights at a stretch] and then a bag of outpatient visits to test my blood and what have you, culminating in the handing over to me of a big assed cheque for the aforementioned amount. In one TCP smelling swoop I have cleared my council tax debt and my James debt, plus trousered over a grand Steve! That's enough USA Trip money in the pot to get me very nicely started. It's enough money to wave in my face that I put my years long near crippling fear of hospitals sort of almost behind me.

I'm not gonna lie to you, what kind of way is that to start a relationship, I was scared. All the way there I was full of nerves. Sweating balls on the tube [a condition that was in no small part made worse by the broken air con - "Ladies and gentlemen this is your westbound Central Line service. Just a note to advise there is no air conditioning on this particular service today due to a fault, so if you do see any fellow passengers in distress, or if anyone faints, let someone know at the next available station.”] Brilliant.

The hospital I have to get to is right at the bollock end of London, so it takes over an hour and couple of train swaps for me to get there. By the time I arrive I'm a little early, but it's hotter out than in and I'm nervous as you like so my shirt isn't exactly winning any prizes. I step out of the footpath and there it is. The closest I've been to hospital in well over 2 years [since I smashed my friend’s hand this one time as a favour... to him]. Last time I tried to set foot in one before that it didn't go so well for me. Panic attack for fun.

I HATE HOSPITALS, alright? HATE THEM! They smell wrong, for a start. Plus, I don't know if you know this, but they are stacked to the fucking lid with the dead and dying. I guarantee that if you pop in for a piss one morning that before you can even wash your hands someone has died. If that happened in a hairdressers or an HMV it would freak you out. I don't see why hospitals get a free pass just because sick people go there. Fuck hospitals, and all who sail in them. Just walking into reception the weird air hits you. All clinical and sanitised and WRONG! Makes my dick itch.

The actual company reception ain’t too bad if I'm honest. After a while I started to forget I was even in a hospital, since it's pretty non-descript in there. Standard desk, standard uncomfortable and way too close to each other chairs, and standard overly polite to the point of rudeness receptionist.

So like I say, I'm a little early. There are only 2 guys in reception when Judith or whatever her name is buzzes me in. Clipboards at their sides, chillaxing. I get my little ID bracelet and take my own board over to the corner to check it out. It's thick as hell, but everything in there is stuff I already know, on account of they told me about it over the phone and then e-mailed it to me afterwards. I read it anyway. What else is there to do while I wait? Name of the compound they're testing, reasons for doing so, dates we need to be available, observed side effects [nothing major to be honest. Headaches, joint pain etc... shit that you get on a regular basis for no reason whatsoever without getting paid for it] and so forth. Like I say, things I've been told already. More people start to show up, everyone's given the same paperwork and waits until we all get called through to another room, where a soft spoken doctor goes through said paperwork one more time to make sure we're all fully in the picture before we sign our consent forms.

THEN the idiots start to pipe up. One guy who can't do the study because he was for some reason under the impression that the study would last TEN FUCKING MINUTES! It's a 16 week study. 2 sets of overnights etc etc... things that YOU know, that I know because I was told 4 times in 4 different ways. Same as he was, same as we all was. Another guy bows out because he doesn't like the idea of an intravenous drip. It's IN THERE! I don't understand people. We had to sign the consent forms but because they've implemented some new dating system, you gotta write the dates out in the format 24/MAR/2010 rather than 24/03/10. I know this because the soft spoken doctor said as much. Twice. And yet for ten minutes people are scribbling out their mistakes and then having to initial and date them, but they date it fucking wrong again and so they have to get a new form which they fuck up and so on and so on until I'm about to lose my friggin' mind.

I lose all faith in these people when, having discovered that they've all been screened at this hospital before, I have to sit and listen to them sniggering when the nurse says we have to strip to our underwear to get weighed. I have laughed when James says "eat", even at times when he means food, and it didn't even occur to me to so much as snigger. If I get in to the trial I have to spend 6 full days with most of these people. I might not last.

I was sweating, like I said, so when I get into Cubicle 4 and lift my shirt over my head I get a nose full of the smell of anxiety incarnate. It ain’t good folks. I start to panic. Some Nurse is gonna be coming in here any minute to give me the medical cold hands once over and I reek to high heaven and back. Then I spot it. On a shelf. A tub of alcohol wipes. That'll do me! I whip one out and try to tear it off, but that just pulls more out, so I try to tear those but that just pulls MORE out... 3rd time round I stamped the lid down and got a wadded handful of wet alcohol wipes for my trouble. Gave my pits a wipe front to back and stashed the wipes in my back pocket. Only now I smell like Jack Daniel's waistcoat. I panic again, which doesn't make the sweating exactly go away, till I spy a dry soap dispenser. You know, that stuff you just rub into your hands and it cleans them then dries away? That goes under the arms as well. Before I can mix it up properly the nurse comes in and it's time to get physical.

Can't believe I said that. I feel bad about myself. She asks some questions and sticks all them little sucker deals on me for the ECG, hooks me up to the machine and then leaves me there looking like an NHS Weapon X. I'm not the biggest fan of the blood letting either. You can hear the blood, your blood, spilling and sloshing around in the bag. It's unnatural. A piss sample later [You gotta fast for 4 hours before the screen but they let you drink water, so my sample was weak as... well piss] and then you get a biscuit and a quick run down by Germany's most soothing doctor.

End of story. They'll let me know the results of my blood and urine tests tomorrow and, as long as my sleepy village GP gets his arse in gear and sends over my medical history sharpish, I could well be in. You'll find out I guess.

Equilibrium - Brought to you by Gazz Wood -