I need a place to put my thoughts about the approaching clinical trial I am on track to take part in. I want a place where I can share the results, trials and tribulations. The thought of having a hole drilled into my head to implant stem cells is a little scary but the phase 1 studies were quite good. And then I consider, what if I end up in the control group? 1/3 of participants are in that group. But that also means 2/3 are not controls. Here is the actual study listing https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02448641?term=stem+cell+AND+stroke&rank=31

So I'll start with something I hadn't thought about in years until a friend said that I must be excited to be a test subject and I remembered being what we used to call human crash test dummies.

Back in the late 80's when I was at my peak after a rather exciting summer spent riding my bicycle across the country, I and a couple others were invited to participate in some studies at the human performance lab at SUNY. We all besides being in top shape were all advanced divers with hundreds of deep dives each. The lab was under contract to study human endurance limits for the DoD, in other words find the breaking points where we would start to fail. We wore more monitors and more electrodes then I've seen since, even in ICU.

The first series of experiments where in a human centrifuge. If you've ever seen the films of pilots, etc sitting in a spinning cabin at the end of a long arm, well that was it. The object was to spin us until we would black out from the G-forces. When you blacked out your hand would let go of a dead mans switch and the device would brake to a stop. After getting a base line they started putting us in inflating G-suits to see how much that improved our endurance.

Another test we did was hypothermia studies. They would immerse us in a tank of water and start chilling it. They measured everything from skin temp to EKG to core temperature. I leave it to you to figure out how they got our core temp. We had to perform everything from dexterity to math tests as they cooled our bodies. It was not fun...but I lasted the longest, I don't know if that was a good thing.

We did several other things for them but you get the idea. Being a guinea pig isn't new territory for me but this is far and away the most advanced. So as things move forward I'll give updates but they've tentatively set the surgical date for Oct 10 but there are several tests to be done and baselines to be established between now and then.