A Bum Deal...

And for the benefit of my American readers, here I’m referring to le derrière, and not some poor homeless dude.

It seems I’ve drawn the short straw at work (again!) as I’m writing a clinical study report about....how can I put this politely?....a medical drink that will ensure complete evacuation of the bowels in preparation for a surgical procedure, such as a colonoscopy. Deeeeeeelightful!!!

As the drug is in its early stages of development, the study took place in healthy young men - we call them ‘volunteers’. You’ve got to ask yourself though....who in their right mind volunteers to willingly glug down gallons of laxatives, knowing full well they are going to be spending the next few hours chained to the toilet?

It’s probably not surprising then that the study took place in an economically challenged European country, where there are more than two dozen strapping young blokes quite willing to put themselves through this torture in exchange for a few Euros. Having the runs is unfortunately not the only side effect they’d encounter.... stomach cramps, dizziness, vomiting....you name it they could suffer it!

But my sympathies lie also with the staff who worked on this clinical trial. Back in my student days, I paid my way through my PhD by working weekends in a trial unit that ran studies not all that different from this one. I had some pretty crappy roles at first, possibly none worse than having to collect the patients’ urine bottles, measure the volume they’d peed and decant a small sample into a lab tube, every 2 hours for 16 hours. Talk about taking the piss! Luckily for me, the trials that I worked on never involved Le Poop sampling... the folks that worked on the study I have to write about wouldn’t have been so lucky. In a laxative study, there’d naturally be a great deal of attention paid to that rather wiffy end product.

Just hope the trial unit splashed out on some heavy duty nose plugs for their staff...and some ultra soft 4-ply for those ‘volunteers’...

In bizarrely related news, this week I got my own back on my friend who gave me the Cock-A-Doodle pad for my birthday pad (described here) with this pretty distasteful gift of scented animal print toilet rolls....

I reckon that's a bum (w)rap!