By Emilee Prado
The chairs smelled of new vinyl, assembly line raw. Antiseptic, of course, pervaded the clinic. After I’d sat in the empty waiting room for no more than five minutes, I was invited behind the heavy door and shown toward an overstuffed grandfatherly chair that stood out for its coziness amid the sanitation. When I sat, my feet didn’t touch the floor. I held out my right arm, but after a miss-stick sprayed the phlebotomist with my blood, I offered my left arm instead.
I didn’t need tests. I didn’t need care. According to the paperwork, I was a healthy participant.
A dozen small vials were drawn that day, but I’ve donated more. Pints of blood have gone to different research studies over time and maybe twenty gallons of plasma. Donation is a tricky word when we’re talking about human bodies. In addition to intravenous draws, I’ve received monetary compensation for donating urine, feces, mucus, ear wax, and tears. I’ve let people scrape from my tongue. At different points in time, I’ve swabbed my face or armpit or groin and mailed those microscopic flecks of myself in boxes to labs across the country. But it hasn’t been just myself going out. I’ve also let medical research put things in. Ultrasound wands, otoscopes, and needles, sure, but also the unknown. I swallowed unmarked pills for twelve weeks in the name of getting more options available to those of us who have struggled with what could be labeled PTSD. I’ve consented to being injected with new vaccines, and along with hundreds of other participants like me, our bodies made sure that shots for COVID-19 and the flu would save the lives of the more vulnerable.
I should clarify that in the wording of every consent form, participants are compensated what’s usually about minimum wage for their time, not for their fluids or anything else. Perhaps compensation for time is only to clarify and satisfy legal conditions. Maybe it’s a way to make people feel as if they are not subordinate to but necessary for a booming medical industry. Maybe the wording is meant to draw more people toward becoming subjects—or to use the newer, more frequently used term participants—which are in constant deficit.
In the US, it’s illegal to sell almost any part of a human body (hair, for example, is one notable exception). But what if I framed the type of donation I’ve participated in as something like medical prostitution? Sluts for science? There is a strange sense of intimacy with medical institutions here. I’ve also experienced a lingering sensation of feeling used, despite how I’ve volunteered. Certainly, no one has been gratified by any of my work in this field, but hopefully, people were helped. This thought makes my personal ambivalence meter lean a little more toward okay. I feel a mixture of empowerment and shame when I give pieces of my body away. I felt both practical and desperate back when I did it regularly.
In addition to the specimen collection aspects of research, I’ve also slept attached to machines so science could watch me breathe. My heart has beat and beat, sending spikes along yards of EKG printouts. My ears have been pummeled by dozens of hours of MRI cacophony during brain scans while the machine’s coils lurched and vibrated with fervor in the white casing around me. The cognitive tests I’ve taken certainly outnumber the medical ones. I’ve remembered and forgotten for Alzheimer research. I’ve navigated new interfaces for anxiety and depression education. I’ve sorted random objects, made patterns, pronounced synecdoche, tried to have the fastest reaction time, and been monitored while having virtual reality experiences. I spent two hours every day for weeks training to navigate a video game city and wondering if I’d actually gotten better over time. Rarely do participants get to see any results.
So why did I sometimes put myself through all kinds of hells to essentially make a part-time job of participation in medical and cognitive research? It’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason. One thing I know is that I’ve held a range of other jobs in recent years, and although I’ve enjoyed aspects of them, they are mostly places where I left my blood, sweat, and tears and returned home a little emptier. However, when selling my body to science, it felt more like buying more time or more self rather than losing it.
I began participating in research consistently while I was facing an uncertain future and working a 2021 temp gig, contact tracing during the pandemic. I’d just moved to a city where I didn’t know anyone and felt foreign and uneasy in the US after spending years in other countries. At first, research allowed me to build connections with my new home by learning the geography between clinics. I was lonely too, although far too stoic at the time to admit it. Because I had no community in the traditional sense of local friends and family, I began looking forward to the strangers I’d meet each week. I welcomed the return to chitchat in my native language while also learning new ways of communication that helped each conversation hit some real note rather than just floating along as a superficial nicety. I learned about the kindness of other humans. It’s sort of funny to think that some of the nicest people in the world are the ones asking, Can I experiment on you?
Sometimes I had fascinating conversations with a researcher about their personal life, their past, their loved ones, their career goals, or their thoughts about science. When someone would hold my arm as they stuck the needle in my vein, it was often the most human contact I’d have in a week. Maybe it was because her white coat and lavender scrubs had already been sprayed with my blood, but I had a particularly meaningful conversation with the phlebotomist who sat me in the overstuffed chair that day.
She wasn’t much older than me. An artist too, a painter and a poet. She teared up when she told me about her dreams. Both of us turned out to be buying a stepping stone made of time, not on a path toward a career of wealth or fame, but on a path that would allow us to perpetually search, question, and make something newer or better or bigger while each of these creations in turn created emotions, journeys, catharsis, and spaces for others. Everyone sells themself in some way, so does it matter which piece of the artist’s body funded that moment of awe, laughter, heartbreak, or brief escape from the transactional world?
The painter day-lighting as a phlebotomist had the same dream that my grandparents’ families had when they trekked thousands of miles across lands or seas toward the vague idea of less pain and more joy—the so-called better life.
Twice, I’ve moved far away from a home toward the unknown to escape memories and acts of violence. I left a third home mostly due to the pain of a broken heart. I was still heartbroken when I volunteered for that first vaccine, and blood draw, and MRI. But as I kept leaving parts of myself for science, I kept finding parts of my way to a future where I’ll continue to create.
Could participating in medical research be some form of endurance art?
The pieces of my body have found plenty of new homes in fridges and freezers, so thanks to medical research, whenever I die, I might just outlive myself.
Emilee Prado is a writer, artist, teacher, and former research assistant at CUChange: The Center for Health & Neuroscience, Genes & Environment, which is housed at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her literary investigations into science and the human body often draw from her experience as a participant in various cognitive and clinical studies in Colorado and Arizona. She currently resides in Tucson.