My Not-So-Secret Life as a Guinea Pig

 

That's me, ready to get zapped

Just over five years ago, I came across a Facebook post offering $50 to provide a blood draw, a saliva sample, and answer a few questions about my health.  I’ve never been one to turn down easy money, and so I ventured into a building in Boston’s Longwood Medical Center complex of hospitals and labs. I did no flinch during the blood draw (I’m a long-time blood donor) and I took the questions seriously. Because I asked, I was told my ‘blind samples’ were part of creating a profile of a projected 40,000 random individuals.

Maybe it was because I asked a lot of questions (including how ‘random’ a sample could be if it drew its participants from Facebook users who had enough time on their hands and the wherewithal to travel into the city to participate), but I was asked if I might be interested in other studies. As I am always looking for a potential book story line, I said ‘sure’.

Fifteen or 20 studies later, I am now on call sheets. There is a notebook on me somewhere that says I am apparently a rara avis in the world of biomedical research. I am over 70, I have had no major illnesses or surgeries, I take only a single prescription drug (for cholesterol), I have no tattoos or miscellaneous metal parts in my body, I do not have a fear of enclosed spaces, I know how to lie still and follow instructions, and I show up on time.

Some of these are done in hospitals, some are at MIT, but the preponderance of the studies I’m involved with are at the MassGeneral Research Institute located at the Charlestown Navy Yard (CNY) in Boston. Today, if you’re looking for evidence of the presence of the U.S. Navy, it’s in the form of ‘Old Ironsides’, which is anchored at the west end of the Yard.

I’ve been in three of MassGeneral’s buildings at CNY, but the one that stops me in my tracks every time is a full block in size and eleven stories tall. For a century, the Navy made steel cables in it. Now, it is roughly a million square feet of biomedical research.  As the photos show, MassGeneral stripped the building back to its skeleton and re-built it for science. The ground floor is lots of MRI machines, meeting rooms, a very nice cafeteria and what passes for public space in a building where entry is strictly by key card.  Above the first floor? Lab space and testing rooms.

The study I’m about to complete involves TMS – transcranial magnetic stimulation. Several years ago, researchers found placing a powerful magnet on the head of someone suffering from depression, and focusing it on the very specific part of the brain that is linked to that emotional state, made a demonstrable and measurable improvement in the subject’s behavior and mood. The efficacy is sufficiently ‘replicable’ – meaning it really works in practice – that TMS for depression is now covered by insurance and Medicare. The Principal Investigator for the study with which I’m associated is looking at other areas where TMS might have efficacy. That’s all I think I’m allowed to say on the subject.

For me, the highlight of any new project is getting to meet the ‘research coordinators’. Every year, MassGeneral brings in extraordinarily bright college graduates who are keenly interested in the life sciences, but who are uncertain where their longer-term interests lie. Do they want to go to medical school? Pursue a PhD? In return for doing the ‘grunt work’ of escorting participants like me around, performing labs, and spending many hours entering data and creating schedules; they get the opportunity to see the cutting edge of science being created. They also get to sit in on talks and symposia. They get to ask questions. It’s a two- or three-year contract, after which you’re kicked out of the nest and expected to fly on your own (but with an exceptionally prestigious bullet point on your med or graduate school application).

Being an on-call guinea pig is not something I expected to occupy me in retirement, but I have my reasons for continuing to volunteer. Whenever I’m called, I jokingly ask the recruiter each time if the chances of spontaneous combustion are above or below 30%. I know I’m in demand when one quickly responded, “It’s a little over 30%, but that’s why we called you. We figured you’d still say ‘yes’.”

Paradise Found

I’m taking a detour away from gardening topics today to ponder something I read on the Internet (and, yes, I know treating things on the Internet seriously is the beginning of an excursion into a rabbit hole from which there is no extraction). The subject of the post was ‘What is Paradise’.  The author posted a vintage-20^th-century photo of a palm tree by the water and explained why this was his or her ideal place.

Which got me to wondering what was my own perfect place. At the very ripe age of 76, I have come to the conclusion Paradise can exist in multiple places. It can exist in memory and it can exist in real time. It can be a place and it can be something that happened in a place that is otherwise pedestrian.

Me, in my back yard, age 11

My childhood back yard was paradise (except when it needed to be cleaned up after a hurricane; and it lost part of its glow when mowing it became my responsibility). But it was a special place where I was Boy King; tracking lizards, building treehouses (hint: Tamarind tree limbs break just by looking at them the wrong way) and eating oranges fresh off the tree.

I camped out in that back yard. It was at the age of 5 or 6 that, late one evening writing on a sheet of paper in a tent by flashlight, I discovered numbers are connected and keep increasing. I wrote from 1 to something like 600 just to make certain my discovery had no fatal flaw.

The Cape Florida lighthouse

Key Biscayne, the island south of Miami Beach and connected to the mainland by a causeway, was the paradise of my teen years. Not so much the large county park that occupied the north half of the island. Crandon Park had a fine beach but there were too many people. My preferred places were the stub of a beach at Bear Cut or the deserted, pre-state-park beach by the Cape Florida lighthouse at the southern tip of the island. These were places where only teens of a certain age could go (illegally, in the case of the lighthouse), and much kissing went on.

Our brownstone in Boerum Hill

Brooklyn was the paradise of my late twenties. I could not believe I actually lived there and owned a genuine brownstone on a street with a row of 19^th Century brownstones on either side of it. The Bergen Street subway station was just five minutes distant, and all of New York was a subway ride away; Betty and I made the most of every day: seeing shows, museums, and her beloved Yankees. We even saw a World Series game.

Me in the Marais, early 2000s

Paris and London were my twin paradises of my thirties, forties and fifties. Both cities were magical. I could not get enough of them. I invented reasons to go to them and I tried (unsuccessfully) to get myself transferred there by two employers. Both cities were (and still are) steeped in history yet attuned to ‘today’. The people were tolerant of our thick American accents and broken French.

On the beach at Hana, early 1980s

But paradise was also a small hotel on the island of Maui in a village called Hana. Betty and I discovered it in 1980 on our second trip to the Islands following an intensely disappointing first stay in Honolulu and Hilo. For more than twenty years following that encounter, for the last week in January and first week in February, we called it home; amid friends we never knew before that first visit. Alas, in the early 2000’s, a woman named Caroline Hunt also discovered it and decided it needed to be more ‘upscale’. She didn’t pave paradise; she just ruined it.

In my sixties and seventies, paradise is a small town in New England; one that logic and greed dictates ought not to exist, but does. Medfield has defied the odds and remained a village free of Big Box stores and cheek-by-jowl fast food emporiums. Its borders are watersheds and forested reservations, yet it is just 18 miles from the center of Boston. 

With my oldest friend,
Hank Rawlings,
2025, in Florida

But paradise is also a state of being. It is the sight of old friends and being in their presence after a too-long absence. Paradise is standing in front of a group of strangers and making them laugh. Paradise is working on my hands and knees in a native plant garden I helped bring into being; and co-managing an acre of vegetable gardens where 70 families not only are growing food for their own table, but placing their surplus in wheelbarrows every week to share with those less fortunate. Wherever there is joy, there is the potential for paradise.

Will there be other places I will come to think of as paradise? I only hope I have sufficient years remaining to find out. Seven decades ago, I traded the security of my back yard paradise for the opportunity to see and explore a wider world. I have spent time on six continents and stopped counting countries visited when I got to 50. I truly do not know if there are additional paradises out there, but I’m willing to give it a try.