Wednesday, August 10, 2011

My Life As A Medical Experiment

At the beginning of the summer, I responded to a request from my health care provider to take part in a study. They were interested in finding out the effects of large-ish doses of Vitamin C on inflammation. I was interested in the hundred dollars they were offering to participate in their research. Now, several weeks later, I have been poked, prodded, weighed, measured and drained of a few ounces of blood. And I'm taking a thousand milligrams of Vitamin C a day. Or am I?
Because it's an experiment, it could be that I'm really swallowing a thousand milligrams of sugar every morning. It doesn't matter. That's my job for the next sixty days.
It made me think of my wife, and how she re-introduced me to vitamins way back when we first got together. As a bachelor, I had taken whatever minerals and nutrients were in frozen pizza and Chips Ahoy and done the best I could to metabolize them in some healthy way. This brought great shock and dismay to my future life partner, and she began to contour my diet and regimen in hopes of making that part about "til death do us part" more meaningful.
She has been quite successful in keeping me from succumbing to the general plague that exists in the petri dish of elementary school classrooms. She discovered early on that my strength is in routine. If she says take a multi and a C every morning, I do it. Until she tells me to stop. If she tells me fish oil is important for keeping the vampires away, I'll be choking down big greasy yellow tablets of that until she tells me to stop.
And that's what she does for me. She keeps me healthy, or healthy enough to participate in somebody else's experiment.

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