Our Government Makes Me Sick

Last year, and the year before, I sold the use of my body to rich and willing men.

Just my stomach and my brain, though.

And they were psychiatrists, working on research at the National Institutes of Mental Health.

I started on medical studies because I was a volunteer earning a stipend of $50/month, and had noticed an ad in the free daily Express newspaper that comes with a morning metro train ride. The screening calls making sure of my eligibility took place, awkwardly, at work, where I stretched my office’s phone cord to its limit to try to get some privacy. When I had been approved, the NIMH sent a complimentary taxi service to pick me up for a preliminary physical exam and psych eval, and said they would contact me when a relevant study came up.

One did, not long after. I had told the overseeing doctor that I would not be willing to take any drugs, experimental or otherwise, and my handlers assured me that I would not be taking any, here.

There would be pills, of course – but they would be harmless amino acids, the building blocks of life, the essential parts of protein that your body encounters every day. I agreed that that would be fine with me, and they signed me up.

That first study, on tryptophan depletion, went quite well, despite involving the ingestion of no fewer than 76 pills (and possibly more) on each occasion; I went in two separate times, once for placebo and once for the “real” pills – double-blind, of course – and each time completed a computer task while strapped into an MRI. The task was to watch the computer screen, reflected onto a mirror immediately above my eyes, for a flash of yellow dots, followed by a delay and the flash of a single yellow dot. If the single dot was in the same position as any of the dots in the initial flash, I was to press the first button on the button box; if it was in a new position, the second button.

This was a boring task, and I was bad at it.

Still, they paid me for following protocol, not for succeeding at strange yellow-dot-flashing tasks. And they paid me well.

So when they called again a month later for a study involving amygdala response to emotional stimuli – and this one not even involving pills – I agreed to do it.

This time, the MRI task was to memorize two “target faces” and then identify, again by pressing the first or second button, whether the faces shown in a random sequence were one of the target faces or not. The real purpose, of course, was to study the amygdala’s response to the emotions shown on the faces of the randomly sequenced images, not to test a subject’s aptitude for remembering faces. All of the studies were like that: apparently about one thing, but secretly about something else.

Several months went by before I got another call, but then I got three. I was in another MRI study, a PET scan study, and finally, the long and terrible second amino acid study that ended my tenure as a government guinea pig.

This study was testing the effect of tyrosine, a different amino acid, and I had wrongly assumed that it would be similar to the first, almost pleasant, study I had done.

Instead of pills – of which there would have needed to be over 100, the handlers assured me – this study involved an amino acid drink. Orange had been pre-selected as my flavor. I shudder even now, remembering it, though I had no previous aversion to orange.

The drink was brought to me in a giant Styrofoam cup, and was foamy and gritty at the same time, a crazy orange – the hue that orange cotton candy would be, if it existed. I needed to drink 18 oz. of the cocktail within about half an hour in order to allow my body to digest it before the MRI scan. The first half or two-thirds were okay – the drink was bitter, but manageable – but after that, every sip was a trial. I watched hospital cable in an attempt to distract myself from the dreadful knowledge that I would need to swallow more.

I did eventually finish it.

This is the point in the story where the squeamish should stop reading.

After about an hour and a half, when the handlers assured me the drink should be gone from my stomach, I threw up. The nurse who had placed the red biohazard bucket next to me, saying “I always put it here, and no one’s ever been sick on my watch,” seemed dismayed as she removed the bucket and former contents of my stomach (which looked exactly as they had in the cup) from my bedside. The presiding psychiatrist came in to take a look.

“It’s not too much,” he said, evaluating the contents of the bucket. “We can probably still go ahead, if you’re up for it.”

I was feeling better and so agreed.

But the feeling better didn’t last. I got through the MRI tasks – a sort of “slot machine” game in which you won actual money, but through no fault of your own – and the mood scales, and went straight to bed when I got home. It was right before Christmas, so I left work early on my last day before vacation, and hitched a ride back to CT with a friend, pushing the memory of the hellish orange drink to the back of my mind.

I was unsure of whether I should go back for the second half of the study, but the handlers and doctors agreed: Everyone had some trouble one time, but no one had ever been sick in both halves of the study. I would definitely be fine if I came back to complete it.

Two months after the first half of the study, then, I decided to return.

I won’t give a moment-by-moment account of what happened to me then, as it’s almost too sickening for me to recount, let alone to inflict on innocent readers. Suffice it to say that I asked to be let out of the MRI, threw up once an hour for five hours, barely made it home in the taxi before being sick again, and went to bed immediately on my return. For two days.

Well, I thought, at least I was of some use to science.

The next time I spoke with my NIMH handlers, they were trying to convince me to participate in a drug study, which I refused.

“But what happened to the results of that other study, the one where I got sick?” I asked.

They knew exactly which one I meant; no one had ever gotten that sick before.

“Oh,” they said. “We’ve been having trouble with the results from that study. After you, everyone started getting sick. We can’t get accurate results if your body doesn’t digest the whole amount of amino acids.”

So it wasn’t even good for them.