Dear Participant,
Clearly, you have [medical problem we’re interested in sciencing]. We’re sorry that no one’s been able to help you with [medical problem we want to science] or provided any consolation ice cream, but as long as you’re here moldering from [sciency medical problem], we may as well glue sensors to you and do science!
To begin, you’ll need to get yourself to the Research Facility, which will require several hours of travel and there will be no Burger King along the route. (Really, we checked.) Please drive your spouse, partner, or friend’s car to the facility, just to make following Siri’s instructions through janky bluetooth headphones more exciting. The adrenaline in your bloodstream when you arrive may help keep you awake during what follows, which is sufficiently tedious to make working on your knitting project look like a three-day rave.
When you enter the Facility, you’ll be met by someone so nice you won’t be certain she has a pulse. She will take you, in an elevator that could fit six dromedaries, down to a long, creepily clean sub-basement hallway that could comfortably house giraffes (was this building once a zoo?).
Here she will read you instructions, show you videos on those instructions, walk you through the instructions, and then ask you to initial a stack of paper sheets verifying that you’ve gone over the instructions. Then you’ll read her the instructions, and agree on how they work. She will then read you the instructions back. By now you’ll be in very cordial agreement about instructions, both in general and in particular.
Once you’ve gone over the initial instructions, you’ll crack open some intermediate instructions about how to apply the sensors to your body. The lady with possibly no pulse will kindly glue things to you while reciting the gluing instructions. The PI’s little brother will watch from horn-rimmed glasses over the top of his phone. He’s about ten years old, and you will find out from him that his brother (the PI) is only six years older.
Now you’ll be ready to Do the Test. It is called a Walk Test, because it Tests your Walking. You will Walk down the hallway and back for six minutes as fast as you can. There will be no disco ball or music, no matter how often you ask for these. There will be no clapping or laughter, just the squeak of your inappropriate footwear and the swish of the skirt you’ll wear because the preparatory letter tells you to wear clothing that allows the attachment of sensors to your upper thigh (??????— so it’ll be either a bathrobe or that stupid skirt, which will definitely get in your way and ride up your butt while you Walk as Fast as You Can).
It will be mildly to intensely disconcerting that No Pulse and Ten-Year-Old just kind of… watch…while you Walk. When Round Two of Six Minutes of Walking Very Fast Between Cones is up, a digitized airhorn will play off of a glitchy Samsung hot-mess of a phone and someone will wheel an office chair under your butt to sit you down immediately, whereupon you will Answer Questions.
The Questions will include How breathless are you? and What is your fatigue level? And you will want to yodel DUDE I HAVE TODDLERS WTF ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT but instead you will huff, politely, some number between 1 and 10, because you’ll reckon that, though you’re not feeling so great, neither are you dead, so maybe…5?
Sadly, sometimes our patients die. Should you die during the Walk Test, be informed that we may request an autopsy to further the science and also get the sensors back.
If you make it home, you’ll be replicating the experiment in your back yard with the cones and the obscenely large measuring tape we’ve provided. Don’t lose the sensors; they’re expensive. The Samsung phone though… if you lose that maybe NBD. Just upload the data first.
A couple final tips:
When your son steals the cones, don’t panic— they don’t fit in the prepaid return-labeled FEDEX box we’ve provided anyway.
Don’t forget to keep the fitness tracker watch on at home for a full week after the initial Walk Test, no matter how many times your daughter tries to lick it.
Again, thank you for your devotion to Science. We anticipate being able to build a better Testing Experience and Reliability of Data for people like you, who have [medical mystery tours for bodies], given the kindly help you’ve agreed to provide purely because you were overcaffeinated when the doctor asked if you’d like to participate.
Should we opt to take blood and pursue the Genetic Testing portion of your consent form at any point during the study, we promise to notify your Viking Ancestors that you can, indeed, walk Very Fast Between Cones. [Somewhere, in all likelihood, someone is cheering!]
Sincerely,
Science
My half-century partner wondered what medical malady might be about to overcome me when I
LOLOLOLOLOL squarely in the midst of our sunrise worship service with ceremonial caffeine in hand. Oh the EXTRAORDINARY lengths to which Dr. Science & his 10-yr olds go!
Well done
....now let me tell you about Archaeological Anthropologist's latest theory on how the Northern European world, at least the half who survived the Bubonic plague about a millennium ago, likely contibuted to your sciency medical problem... : >/
We could swap glasses we could.