In which the author emits loud noises, gets her thumb squished, and barely avoids being mistaken for a suicide bomber.

It has been almost exactly a year since I made my preliminary clinic visit prior to participating in a running study I saw advertised at one of the local running stores, and now after too many delays and miscommunications to count, I am an official subject. My baseline phase began on Saturday, and I won't find out which treatment group I've been assigned to until tomorrow, the day before I am scheduled to begin my ten days of sleep deprivation or running deprivation or both or neither. But I still feel very much like the subject of some study, which is exactly the reason I signed up for this in the first place. (Though the $800 I'll get upon finishing is what got me to persist when my participation fell through, then fell through again, then fell through once more.)

For the most part, the study has been fairly unobtrusive thus far. I have to record my daily activities in two-hour blocks, and the times I go to bed each night and get up each morming. And I have to wear a wristwatch-like device called an Actiwatch on my left wrist, which somehow measures my activity level. Three times a day I press a little button on the Actiwatch to rate my level of pain, wait 60 seconds, and then rate my level of fatigue. Twice a day the watch beeps at me to remind me to do the ratings, but once we fell back Saturday night the watch's clock was off by an hour, which means that I now need to ignore the beeping and wait an hour to do my ratings. So far my watch has only beeped at me when I'm in my office or walking outside and I haven't had to worry about disrupting anything or anyone, but come Sunday it's going to go off in the middle of Sunday School, and then again during choir. I haven't figured out how to deal with that yet.

Twice over the course of the study I am also required to take saliva samples three times a day for a period of three days. I have eighteen little plastic tubes with stoppers and cylindrical cotton wads that look sort of like the cotton the orthodontist stuffs between your lips and gums when attaching braces. About the time I rate myself on the Actiwatch, I stuff a cotton wad into my mouth and chew it for 60 seconds, then pop it back into the plastic tube, seal it, label it, and store it in the refrigerator.

Also twice over the course of the study I am required to wear a Holter monitor, which is just a fancy heart-rate monitor. This morning after showering, I spent a good twenty minutes in my room hooking it up. There are seven color-coded nodes that need to be attached to my chest as illustrated in a diagram that came with my study binder. The seven wires then need to be looped for slack and taped in place (and so come tomorrow I will have fourteen adhesive surfaces to rip from the skin of my chest - I cringe to think about it). Each of the wires runs from its node to a black box about twice the size of a deck of cards, and the trickiest part of the whole process is figuring out what to do with the box and with the extra lengths of chord. I have one pair of jeans with pockets deep enough to hold it all, and since it's fall (well, winter today - we're in the middle of our first real snow) I can get away with wearing a turtleneck that's long enough to conceal the tops of the chords and also conceals the three nodes that are positioned along my collarbone. As I pulled my shirt on over all the wires and nodes and tape, I felt like a suicide bomber. Today would not be a good day to try to get through airport security, and I was careful to keep my winter coat on until after I had walked past the security guard at the entrance to the local high school when I went there for a field observation this morning.

Finally, my participation in the study includes two trips to the clinic for a four-hour visit, once during my baseline period, and once during the study phase. My first trip was yesterday. I was asked to change into my running clothes, and then I went through a whole series of fun tests. I had an IV inserted into my arm so that my blood could be drawn over and over and over again. I had my thumb squished by a thumb-squishing machine and rated the level of pain upon each squishing. I took cognitive tests (one of which involved showing me a series of at least eighteen different words, having me count backwards by threes from a large number for about a minute, and then writing down all the words I could remember). I filled out a questionnaire about my physical and emotional health, as well as reflections on my identity and experience as a runner. And I did a treadmill test while hooked up to a bulky face mask attached to two long plastic tubes (which made for less than ideal running conditions) during which, while running at my normal pace, the incline was adjusted every couple minutes and I was asked to rate my level of exertion until I decided I couldn't go any longer.

The thumb-squishing got annoying once it lost its novelty, and the running was downright painful, especially since I'm not good at pushing the limits of my exertion, but the visit as a whole was actually kind of fun, and the researcher who is in charge of the project was very pleasant and talkative, which made the experience pretty enjoyable. After I had mentioned going to school in Utah, and having family in Utah, she asked if I was Mormon, and then laughed because they have apparently had quite a large number of LDS participants in this study. "Out of a hundred," she said thoughtfully, "there have been maybe, oh...not a fifth, but definitely more than you would expect." One of the participants had asked jokingly if that was going to affect the findings, "and you know," said the researcher, "it would make sense that undergoing something like sleep deprivation, having a deep faith would help you to deal better with the stressful situation."

Anyway, it's an experience. I'm a bit anxious to know which treatment group I'll end up in, especially since I've been waiting to know for nearly a year. I suppose I can wait one more day - I have to.

And now the Actiwatch is about to go off, so I'd better finish up this post and move somewhere where no one will hear...