I brought a drawing pad and a pen, but almost no one else had anything with them to read or do. By the time I sat down, the drug was kicking in. I felt floaty and calm and then just incredibly sleepy. I lay my head down on the table, and even though it was a cold, hard cafeteria table, I was so doped up it felt sort of cozy and wonderful. I could get into this study, really. The food was hell, but getting stuffed full of opioids and napping was not going to be so bad.
SMACK!!!!! A noise like a gunshot sounded almost inside my head. I sat bolt upright. Beside me Melanie stood holding a ruler she must have slammed down on the table right next to my ear. “No sleeping,” she said. “We are minimizing variability by having all patients remain awake during the day.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” I slurred.
“No, ma’am. I am not,” she said.
“Don’t calls me ‘ma’am.’ Ornly my mom calls me ‘ma’am’ when she’s mad. Nor you. You’re nor my morm,” I said.
So I had to sit there at the table for hours, too tired and drugged to read or draw or really even talk, all my energy going toward battling sleep, knowing that if I succumbed for even a moment I’d be awoken with the fiery crack of Melanie’s ruler hitting the table inches from my skull. It. Was. Literally. Hell.
For lunch, I gagged down a hamburger and soggy fries. After lunch we each received another dose of the opioid and spent a long afternoon sitting at the cafeteria tables. I tried to draw all of us in Dante’s sixth circle of hell but was so sleepy I couldn’t focus on dragging my pen across the paper. There is something particularly horrible about being doped up and ready to blissfully nod off but then not be allowed to do so. Every little while a clinical-trial participant would give in to the narcoleptic effects of the drug and then the ruler would come slamming down, causing all of us to jump. Tim and Mario played Rock Paper Scissors for hours as it was the only game simple enough to follow when stoned stupid on painkillers. Luckily I was too fucked up to consider what the drug might be doing to my system, or what the food was doing to my vegan morals. For dinner, we ate steak fingers (gag!) and institutionalized green beans from a can.
Last night I lay in bed and cried with sadness and shame. “It’s okay,” my roommate said. “I’ve heard hardly anyone has to get rushed to the emergency room during opioid studies, so there’s nothing to be afraid of. I cried through my whole first study, too, but that’s because whatever drug they gave us made me have stabbing liver pains. You’d be surprised what you can get used to, though. By your second or third drug trial, none of this will seem so scary.”
Hopefully the long-term side effects of the opioids will not be terrible. But I haven’t pooped since I got here. The meat/opioid combo has caused my digestive system to go on strike. Only twenty minutes until Nurse Robo-Ratchet calls us for our high-fat breakfast and then loads us back up with opioids and refuses to let us nap.
I am a failed artist. Single. Unemployed. I have had a falling-out with one of my very best friends—the woman who brought light and joy back into my previously stagnant life. I have sold out my vegan values and my body to pay off court fines in an effort at “maturity” and “responsibility.” Hopefully this is as low as this story will go.
Mired in a dark night of the soul,
Roxy
October 14, 2012
Dear Everett,
Last night Tim and Mario and I watched “Point Break” again. Mario argued that Keanu Reeves’s stiff acting made the film, while I argued that it almost ruined it. Only Patrick Swayze (as Bodhi) carried the thing. You could give him the shittiest lines in the world—“I could never hold a knife to Tyler’s throat. She was my woman. We shared time.”—and he would turn them into gold. But we all agreed the last line of the film was dazzlingly bad. FBI agent Johnny Utah catches up to Bodhi at Bells Beach, Australia, as a storm rages and “waves of the century” form. Instead of arresting Bodhi and taking him to jail, where he would surely die from the unhealthy stifling of his testosterone-fueled longing