Lisa was still working the desk. She said, “Hi, Kayla, I haven’t seen you for a while.” I hadn’t done a study for ages. I could still use the money, but I’d been busy with the FF4.
I studied the list, but nothing looked good. Some things I just won’t do. Anything that looks like it will hurt. I did a burn cream study once where they actually gave me a little burn on my butt. Hurt like hell. So now I’m more careful.
I was frowning.
Lisa said, “What about the pulmonary study?”
I shook my head. “I’m going out of town.” The pulmonary study required that I be available for four months. The whole point of doing a study was to help pay for Cancun, not cancel it.
“This just came in,” Lisa said. “Have you ever done a Phase 1 drug trial?”
I had done some drug trials, but they were all for stuff like psoriasis and the burn study. This paid two thousand dollars. It was for a leukemia drug. I’d never done something where you had to take a serious drug. But two thousand dollars was a lot. The whole trip, and spending money. They only wanted twelve people.
She handed me the fact sheet. It had all the usual warnings. This drug is untested on humans … risk …
Normally I wouldn’t have done anything like this. But the chance to make two thousand dollars seemed too good to pass up. Like it was almost fate, you know? I don’t know that I believe in fate, especially now, but it seemed that way at the time. So I signed up.
The trial was on a Thursday afternoon. To get the day off I had to swap with someone else, which meant working a double on
Saturday—wedding in the morning, and another wedding in the
evening. At least in the evening I’d be doing bar, which wasn’t so bad. Handing out glasses of wine and beer to happy drunken wedding guests.
Thursday I went to a medical lab out on Cedar Road.
The Cleveland Clinic has three zones, and it’s all about patients. The front zone where the patients first see the hospital—the lobbies and the doctors’ offices—is really nice. Nice carpeting, nice wood, nice chairs and tables. Plants. Artwork. Then there’s the middle zone, places like the surgical staging areas and the hospital rooms. The hospital rooms try to be nice, but they have to have all this equipment and it’s not like television. It’s kind of cluttered and busy, and there will be stacks of blankets, boxes of latex gloves. Everything feels a little crowded. There’s no art on the walls of the ER or the outpatient staging and recovery areas.
Then there’s the back zone. Maintenance and the kitchen, offices and the places where the actual technicians do the lab work. Basements and closets. Hard light or not enough light. Notices and memos stuck on the wall. “Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work”; “Mandatory Meeting on Health Coverage Changes”; Waste Stock tracking sheets. That was the kind of place where the drug trial took place.
It was a pretty large room with no windows and a linoleum floor. It had one of those long folding tables like you see in a school cafeteria. On the table were vials and cotton swabs, syringes and gloves. A nurse was sitting in a folding chair reading a paperback.
There were ten of us, all guys except for me and one other woman. A lab tech checked us off on a clipboard, and we all had a packet sitting on a plastic chair. “Please sit in the chair with your packet,” the guy with the clipboard said. “The dosages have been calculated based on your weight, and if you sit in someone else’s chair, that could compromise the study.” Then he came to each of us and asked us our name and our birthdate and gave us each a hospital bracelet with all that and an ID number on it. He explained how we would be asked the same thing again before receiving the injection, and that was just to make sure that there were no slip-ups.
Then he explained about double-blind trials. No one in this room, he explained, knew which of us were getting the drug for testing and which were getting the placebo, which was just an injection of saline. He explained phase one testing. The point of this test, he explained, was not to determine if the drug worked, but just to confirm that it was safe for people. This drug, the one we were getting, had been extensively tested on rabbits and monkeys. Rabbits and monkeys, of course, could not report adverse affects, so we were to report any adverse affects we experienced. We would be getting a much smaller dose than the rabbits and monkeys.
I was the second person in the line of chairs. The guy sitting next to me was wearing a plaid shirt and thermal undershirt and work boots. He looked like he did construction. “Have you ever done this before?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’ve done two others, but they didn’t pay as good as this.”
A nurse came and asked him his name, date of birth, and ID number. She took a blood sample from him and then wrote his ID number on a label and stuck it on. Then she did the same thing to me.
As she moved down the chairs, I looked in my packet. The drug we were taking didn’t have a real name. It was just called GNT1146. It was for leukemia, lupus, and MS. Which, I will tell you, made me feel a little glad. It’s hard to think you’re doing much for humanity when you’re getting paid to not have psoriasis in a psoriasis study. But what if this drug really cured people with MS? I said that to the guy in the flannel shirt.
He kind of looked at me. He made me think a little of Chris, I don’t know why. Maybe because he was wearing a Ford cap.
“Is that why you’re doing this?” he asked me.
“Hell no,” I said. “I need the money to go to Cancun.”
That made him grin. “Yeah, that sounds good,” he said. He didn’t know what he was going to do with the money. He’s heard about it from his cousin’s girlfriend, who worked somewhere doing some kind of paperwork for medical stuff. He figured he should pay down his credit card, but he was also thinking of saving it toward a down payment on a motorcycle.
The guy with the clipboard started talking, so we shut up, although all he did was tell us the same thing that was in the packet and make us all sign that we understood the risks. It was just like school. I underlined
Phase 1 Drug Trial: Ten to twenty healthy adults
. Phase two is something like fifty sick people. If the stuff doesn’t seem to be as good as what people get anyway, then they stop. Otherwise they go to phase three. (I wondered what it would be like to have leukemia and find out that the experimental drug you are taking didn’t do as good as what normal people get. I decided I was probably not brave enough for phase two, if I ever got leukemia.) Phase three has a couple of thousand sick people in it. Most drugs never get beyond phase two, the guy with the clipboard explained.
About that time, I admit, I zoned out. One of the fluorescents was in the flicker-before-dying stage, and it was annoying me. We had been there over an hour before the nurse finally started giving us injections.
The guy in the flannel shirt took off his shirt and rolled up his thermal undershirt. Then the nurse wrote down the time and his ID number. She asked me my name and birthdate and ID number but didn’t give me the shot. I asked why.
“We wait two minutes between injections,” she said.
“Watching for green and purple spots?” said the guy putting back on his flannel shirt.
“Purple and pink,” she said.
We all three grinned.
Finally, I got my shot.
Then I had to sit there while they gave the next eight people the shot, wondering if my growing headache was a drug effect or the result of the bad fluorescent light. After the last person had gotten the shot, I thought we would maybe fill out some more paperwork and be told when to come back for follow-up. But we still sat there. I figured we’d been told how long we would sit there some time after I stopped paying attention. I was embarrassed to admit I had, so I sat there, thinking about where I was going to eat when I left.
I finally decided I could ask Mr. Green and Purple Spots. I started to say something just as he said, “I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I feel sick,” he said. “Like I’ve got a fever.” He was shaking.
“Hey,” I said, to get the nurse’s attention. “This guy doesn’t feel good.”
He took off his flannel shirt. “I’m burning up,” he said, and rubbed his head, hard.
She came over and asked him to describe how he felt.
“Is this an adverse effect?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Just our luck, I thought. We get a nurse who doesn’t know what she’s doing. But now I wonder if they weren’t allowed to say anything. Or probably she really didn’t know if he just happened to be sick or not.
“Can I have an aspirin or something?” he asked.
“Let’s wait a bit,” she said.
I didn’t know what to do. Everyone else was leaning forward, looking at us. Looking at the sick guy.
“What’s wrong with him?” someone asked the clipboard guy.
“I don’t know,” the clipboard guy said.
After a few minutes, the guy on the other side of me said, “I feel sick.”
The nurse came over and laid her hand against his forehead. I was surprised she didn’t have one of those temperature thingies that they stick in your ear. This guy was shaking, too. “I’m gonna be sick,” he said. The nurse ran and grabbed the trash can and he vomited into it.
My stomach rose, and I looked away. I thought maybe we weren’t supposed to leave our seats, but when the flannel shirt guy threw up, I got up and walked over to the wall.
“Are you all right?” the clipboard guy asked me.
“I think so,” I said, although I didn’t know.
Then the fourth person started throwing up.
“God,” said the first guy. “My head feels like it’s exploding!”
Everybody who wasn’t throwing up was looking at me, or looking at the fifth person, who was the other woman. She was a black woman, maybe in her thirties? She looked scared.
“Can I have something for the pain, please!” said the first guy.
The third guy was lying on the floor now, and the nurse was kneeling next to him. “He’s dizzy,” she said. “I think from spiking a fever.” She pointed to the table where the cotton swabs and stuff were and said to the guy with the clipboard, “There’s packets of Tylenol over there, give him one.”
Clipboard guy said to her, “Should I call EMTs?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “This is your protocol.”
“She’s not sick,” he pointed to the black woman.
“She might be a placebo,” the nurse said. “How many placebos are there?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“God!” said the first guy. “Of, God, please! My head!”
The nurse got him a Tylenol, which by this time seemed a little like pouring a glass of water on a house fire.
“I want to go home,” the first guy said. “Call my girlfriend. I don’t care about the money, I just want to go home.”
“You stay here,” the nurse said. “You’re better here than home.”
The clipboard guy was on his cell phone to someone. “I think you better send a doctor,” I heard him say, and then he saw me watching him and turned his back to us so he was facing the wall.
The black woman didn’t get sick. The guy next to her didn’t get sick, either. And then the guy next to him seemed okay, although I hadn’t been watching the time, so I didn’t know how long it had been. Time was going so slow.
Then that next guy said, “Oh, man, I feel it.”
It was like that story in the Bible, where the Israelites want to leave Egypt and they smear blood on their doors and God sends the angel of death to slay all the firstborn but passes over the houses marked with lamb’s blood. Except we didn’t know who had been marked and who had been saved.
A doctor showed up in about half an hour, but by that time they had called EMTs. Six people had gotten the drug and four were placebos, and we placebos were all standing around not looking at each other or looking at the sick guys. They loaded the sick ones into ambulances. The nurse was standing there in the hallway, holding her fist to her mouth like she was trying not to cry. I wanted to ask her if anything had ever happened like this before, but it was pretty clear no one had a clue.
I drove home.
I stopped on the way home and got a hamburger, but it seemed strange to eat it. I felt like I should be so upset I couldn’t eat. Like that ever happened. When I got home I thought to check my cell phone—I had turned it off when I got to the medical trial because at Cleveland Clinic we weren’t supposed to have our cell phones on inside the building. There was a message from a representative of the company that was doing the study, asking me to call. I called my friend Mel instead and told her what had happened, and she said she’d come over as soon as she got off work.
The phone rang as soon as I hung up, and it was NewsChannel5. I told them I didn’t know if I was allowed to talk, but when they asked me if I could confirm that six people had gotten sick, I said that was true. Then the newspaper called. My cell kept ringing and ringing, until finally I shut it off and turned on the TV.
Mel got there just about the time that it came on the news, so I almost missed the first part. Not that it was very exciting. This news woman with really stiff, unmoving newscaster hair said that six people went to the hospital in a drug trial that had gone horribly wrong. The six men were hospitalized in critical condition with multiple organ failures. Then they showed the outside of a hospital—not Cleveland Clinic, maybe University Hospital?
“Fuck,” Mel said, “that’s so stupid.”
I didn’t know what she meant.
“Showing the outside of the hospital. It’s just a building.”
I said, “It’s where they are.”
“So?” she said. “What does showing you the hospital tell you? It’s like when they are talking about a car accident and they show you this perfectly normal stretch of road with cars whizzing by.”
Mel was really mad. It seemed a weird thing to be mad about.
“It’s wrong,” she said. When she lifted her hands, her bangles jingled. “It makes everything seem normal.”
“They have to show something,” I said, although that sounded lame.
“No they don’t,” she said. “We could go back to Miss My-Hair-Wouldn’t-Move-in-a-Hurricane.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing happened to me.”
“I don’t know why it pisses me off so much,” she said. “It’s just the news.”
The next day they had an interview with the girlfriend of one of the guys who got sick. She said that her boyfriend was in a coma and his head had swelled up to three times its normal size and he looked like the Elephant Man. I didn’t think she should have said that. She should have given him his dignity. All day at work I told people what had happened. People wanted to know if I was going to sue. For what? They had told us that there was a risk. They’ve got to test drugs, or people would still be dying of plague and polio. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just something that happened. I explained it over and over again. But people kept saying to me, “Are you going to sue?”