So I had to go in fasting at 8:30 this morning. After discussing the procedures and resigning a consent form since it's been so long, we got down to the long, slow business. So one of the tests they did was to look at my blood flow or something-- shoot, apparently they killed a few brain cells already cuz I can't even remember stuff from this morning!
--anyway, more interesting is what they did: they put an inflatable cuff (like a blood pressure cuff but smaller) around my wrist and another up around my upper arm. They would squeeze my wrist so that my hand turned purple then had short squeezes of the upper cuff to let small amounts of blood through and they'd measure stuff about the flow. Anyway, the did one where they squeeze the upper cuff for 5 minutes which was a little uncomfortable. Then 15 minutes later they squeezed the upper cuff for 15 minutes so I think my arm nearly fell off! It felt all cold and weird, so I think that's what it's like to have a dead arm hooked to you. or something. It definitely felt good to have the blood rush back into my arm! The dead arm stuff was between 11 and 12 and I had been lying back and told not to move and to relax so by then I was way tired of not moving and relaxing, and my back was sore from lying like that, and there was no tv to watch because it would interfere with one of the other tests that was going on also. So, they also measured my breathing by making me breathe into some crazy home-made looking contraption with tubes hooked up to some tanks and a snorkel-style mouthpiece. There was nothing remarkable about this test except a little bit of amusement for the doctors when they tell me to keep as still as possible and relaxed, and without my hands available for use, get my lips around the mouthpiece. The first one was way too big for my little mouth; it worked much better when they swapped it for a smaller one.
But here's the best test of all: the sympathetic nerve test. (don't know if that's right, but that's certainly what it sounded like! turns out page two, which would tell me this info, of my copy of the consent form is missing!!) so first they try to locate the nerve from the outside. they touch me with a thing that send an electric current into my leg, and if they hit the nerve then it makes my foot twitch. after locating it and feeling pretty good about having found it and the direction it's going, they insert little electrodes into the front (to ground) and the back (in the nerve) and send much smaller current in there and listen to it (and watch its activity on one of those green screens like you see when people have heart attacks on ER or something- it looks a lot like an etch-a-sketch, same technology I think. So, the foot-twitching stuff was pretty funky. When they were kind of on the nerve, but not well, it felt like somebody was thwacking the top of my foot, or flicking it really hard. Then they would suddenly hit it and my foot would give a huge spazzy twitch. They were trying to find a certain part of the nerve, which manifested itself in a specific type of twitch- the upward twitch of the toe end of the foot. They also made my foot do some funky shuffle-twitch. And the whole time I had to keep my leg perfectly relaxed because if the muscles are firing then it totally interferes with listening to the sympathetic nerve. There was once when they were doing it outside of the skin that there was suddenly a lot of clicking and they said, "hear that? it's your muscles or some other nerves firing. try to relax your leg." I did and the clicking immediately stopped. After finding it (which is apparently quite a feat) they just left it hooked up and recording forever (about 2-3 hours I think) and I had to remember to stay relaxed and not move the entire time. I think my heart rate went up the later it got just because my back was hurting and I couldn't move and my arm was aching and I couldn't move it either and I was just stuck there like that forever. The nerve stuff reminded me of that Far Side cartoon (you know, where the surgeons are playing with the guy's nerves and making his leg shoot up).
So that was my first day of testing for this study. Starting Monday I will be signing away my nights to these people and sleeping in their altitude tent. I will also have some other exciting testing days, although they did eliminate some of the more uncomfortable tests, so I won't get poked up as much as I thought I might. I have to find time to keep running regularly so that I can make the most of my high altitude experience- I'll be at 13-15,000 feet, higher than I had thought, so I should get hardcore and do my elite training for the half marathon in may...
I think I'll be able to run 3 times a week at least. oh shoot, only 2 cuz one of those is a swimming day... and the other three days have classes...hmm, I'll have to work on this.
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