Being a Patient

Last week I was a participant in one of the research studies here at my workplace. 'Sleep Study' as it is rightly named; it basically looks at your sleeping habit and quality. It started something like this.

I got into the Clinic and checked myself in at 545PM. I would hate to say that 'I was admitted' as I was not a patient, but just a study participant. But everything after that was like a true experience of being a patient. The nurses come and explain everything they are going to do, even if you know already. They drew sample of my blood to check the % Hemoglobin in my blood so that they could do the required blood work. Well at time I realized how rusty my brain was. It’s all the decent percentage of Hemoglobin contents in my blood that contributes to the problem. And with the numbers I got, the things don’t look good in the near future as far as my rustiness is concerned. But on the flip side it is good for my body J .

Now this is something that was most interesting. The cardiac surgeon came and covered my lower forearm with the blood pressure cuff, and then inflated it. Normally one would expect, the cuff to remain inflated only for a few seconds, but this was something different. She kept it inflated for almost 5-6 minutes. You don’t realize how much pressure it actually exerts, you feel like your blood vessels are going to burst and finally they go numb. Moments later the pressure was released and this point you get some tingling sensation in your forearm. Anyways, the interesting part is when the cuff is inflated. The doctor took ultra-sound scan of my Radial artery. This was to look at the behavior of my arterial walls before, during and after the stress. They wanted to measures the stiffness in my arterial walls as it is one of the major contributing factors of most of the heart diseases.

One amazing thing that I noticed when they took the scan is that, when the inflated cuff is suddenly deflated after about 6 minutes, you can hear the sound of blood gushing through the artery, which exactly resembles the sound of a river gushing through the rapids. Those who have done some decent rafting probably level 3 and above will understand what I mean.

Now comes the part where you do exactly opposite as instructed by the doctor, and I am pretty sure knowingly. Around 9PM the cardio-vascular surgeon along with a sleep study specialist came in and then started hooking me up. Literally, they started attaching some 20- 25 electrodes, all over my body. The few on my legs, arms and torso didn’t really bother me, but the ones on my scalp, face and neck were little problematic. After hooking these electrodes they to my body they took ECG and EKG. Well I didn’t understand why they took both, because as per best of my knowledge they look at your QRS- complex from the cardiac electric waves. The only difference that I found between the two was the number of electrodes that are used. While ECG uses a standard 12 lead approach the EKG uses only 4 leads. To add more complications they put on a CO₂ monitor right in my nostrils. This was to analyze my breath.

So to say finally, the overall study went really well apart from slight discomfort in the sleep. I got my results couple of days couple of days later and as I expected it turns out that I have a good sleeping habit, with no signs of apnea of arrhythmia.

Well, I didn’t take part in the study to know how I sleep. I took part in it just to get a feel of being patient. I am a Research Technologist and I put subjects through something similar if not the same, so I wanted to know how they feel when they take part in the study. I would like to say that being a research subject is OK, but I would like to be a healthy fit person throughout my life, because the same setting but as patient is just frightening.