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 Triaclass="underline" 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.