Free Placebo Junkies by J.C. Carleson

Pain
    Oh yeah, you’re a tough one all right. A genuine badass.
Bring on the needles,
you say.
Take your pound of flesh!
Well, guess what, tough guy? Patience. Sometimes the real pain only comes knocking a whole lot later, and that’s a different set of equations altogether.
    Word Problem: How many X-rays and CT scans now equal one walnut-sized tumor a decade down the road?
    Word Problem: How many years until the doctors find out those pesky little green pills have been silently chip-chip-chipping away at your kidney function and you end up aboard the Dialysis Express?
    Word Problem: How long before that itsy-bitsy spider of a blood clot ambles out of its hidey-hole in the crook of your vein and creeps its way to your lungs or your brain?
    Aw, frowny face. Our fourth-grade teachers lied to us, boys and girls. Math
isn’t
always fun, is it?
If X, then Y…
    No cutting in line! The order of things matters a great deal in the testing world, so queue up accordingly. The first tests are done on animals, of course—
monkeys and rabbits and rats, oh my.
If enough fuzzy-wuzzy bunnies make it through round one alive and kicking, the grim reapers of research move on, setting their sights on the junkies, the indigents, and the professional guinea pigs for round two. (Ahem. This is where we come in.) Next come the college students. Then come the ailing minimum-wagers—legit sick people whose crappy, barely-there health plans and stretched-to-broke budgets don’t have room for things like “proven” cures. Only then, at long, long last and hopefully not too many testing
oopsies
later, will anything ever be tried on the upstanding citizens from Planet Properly Insured. Everyone eventually gets their turn, as long as they’re not dying of impatience (see what I did there?).
    So, it may not be fun, but I told you math for guinea pigs was simple. And now, what better way to conclude than with a few lines from Kenny Rogers, the patron saint of gambling fools:
    Every gambler knows
    That the secret to survivin’
    Is knowin’ what to throw away
    And knowin’ what to keep
    ’Cause every hand’s a winner
    And every hand’s a loser
    And the best that you can hope for
    Is to die in your sleep
    Gamble on, guinea pigs!

CHAPTER 14
    The thing about testing is that you have to get used to overriding a lot of normal reactions.
    Imagine a burly guy coming at you, a large-bore needle in his hand. I’m not talking about one of those harmless little slivers they use when you get a tetanus booster, either. No, the thing in this guy’s hand looks like the goddamn Excalibur of syringes. Assuming you haven’t bolted from the room yet, maybe you also start to have a few concerns about the guy’s hygiene. Like, as he gets closer, maybe you see that he has orange Cheetos dust from lunch still staining his fingers. Maybe he’s got greasy spatters on his scrubs, and his breath smells like a dog’s ass. You take a close look at his face and maybe his eyes are a little bloodshot, and he’s obviously on autopilot, not even paying attention to what he’s doing with that needle in one hand as he kneads your limbs with the other, searching for a nice, meaty spot to violate. Maybe he’s not even looking as he presses that sharp, silver tip against your flesh, because he’s too busy bitching to his coworker on the other side of the room about how they’re cutting lab-tech hours again, and how’s he supposed to make his car payment without overtime?
    Normal reaction: run the other direction as fast as your goddamn feet’ll carry you. It’s a no-brainer, right?
    Or, let’s say some lady hands you a cream. She tells you it’s definitely going to sting, most likely going to burn, and quite possibly going to leave you badly scarred, maybe even disfigured for life. She hands you a clipboard with a ten-point scale on it, tells you to circle a number every five minutes to indicate how much pain you’re experiencing.
Leave it on for as long as you can