a good trial run.
I left Annie a voice mail message about going into PharmaTrial when I knew she’d be in a work meeting—I didn’t want her to talk me out of this! And I told my public defender Mitch, too. He said while it doesn’t count as employment in the eyes of the court, it’ll be a good way to pay off my fines, and I can start applying for jobs as soon as I’m out.
Yesterday morning after I arrived and was checked in, my roommate—a skater chick and self-proclaimed PharmaGrrrl named Cheryl—and I went to the cafeteria for breakfast. All the other trial participants straggled in as well. As soon as I sat down, a cafeteria worker slammed down a tray in front of me. “Enjoy,” he said with fake brightness. The tray held the following vegan’s nightmare:
One little carton of whole milk
One “high-fat breakfast sandwich” consisting of an English muffin, cheese, an egg, butter, and a giant slice of ham
When I went in to apply for the study and got poked and prodded, the scientist guy asked if I had food restrictions. “At PharmaTrial, all clinical-trial participants have to eat the same thing to minimize variability of medication effects,” he said. “So we can’t allow participants with food restrictions.”
“I eat everything,” I said. I knew in that moment I would be selling not just my body to Big Pharma, but also my vegan values. But I glossed over it in my mind, figuring I could push meat around on my plate, eat the bread and veggies, make the best of it.
Now faced with a repulsively animal-product-heavy breakfast, I pulled the ham and egg out of the middle of the breakfast sandwich. As dairy is my weakness, I figured I could polish off the milk and English muffin with cheese and call it good. But before I could even nibble on the English muffin, my coordinator Melanie was at my side saying, “You have to eat everything on your tray.”
“Seriously? I don’t like ham,” I said.
“Equivalent calorie consumption between clinical-trial participants is an integral part of minimizing variability,” Melanie said in a voice that reminded me of the love child of Nurse Ratchet and an evil robot.
I put the ham and egg back on the English muffin and lifted it to my mouth. I literally gagged as I took my first bite, imagining the poor, factory-farmed pig that had lived a miserable life and then died a violent slaughterhouse death so that this high-fat breakfast sandwich could exist. “Thank you, piggy,” I thought as I chewed. I forced down the high-fat bite with a swig of whole milk. Ugh.
“You don’t like it?” the guy across from me asked. He had friendly eyes, a shaved head, and stainless steel loops in both ears.
“I’m a vegan,” I whispered. “I haven’t eaten pork in years.”
“I was in here one time with this girl Ximena? She was, like, lactose intolerant or something, and man, you shoulda heard her burping. I never heard nothing like it before.”
“Ximena?” another guy a few seats down with a neck tattoo of a crowing rooster said. “She’s my girlfriend, man. She’s the one that told me about this study.”
“No way, bro,” the guy across from me said, and laughed. “Small world.”
They reached across the table to bump fists.
“A small world of poor, disenfranchised people whose only option for turning a quick buck is coming in here,” I said. The two guys stared at me as if I’d started speaking in tongues. “Never mind.”
The guy with the shaved head turned to Rooster Boy. “She’s a vegan,” he said, as if compelled to explain my outburst. “She ain’t eaten pork in the longest and it’s making her cranky.”
I nodded. A fair assessment. All around us the coordinators circled, encouraging us to eat. I lifted up my high-fat breakfast sandwich and glumly took another bite.
“You can do it,” Rooster Boy said.
“We believe in you,” the guy with the shaved head said.
The fact that Rooster Boy (Tim) and Shaved Head Guy (Mario) were actually really nice helped a little, but choking down that breakfast sandwich was one of the most repulsive things I’ve ever done.
Afterward, we sat in a main lounge full of couches and recliners as the coordinators called us one by one back into a room like a doctor’s office, gave us each a little cup of pills, and watched as we swallowed them. Then we all had to go back into the cafeteria and sit at the tables again.