Weeks 3 & 4 (The 'poo-donor')

Hi guys! So it's been almost a couple weeks since the drama, and things are MUCH better. I've been keeping my distance & staying busy to help pass the time. Most of ya'll know that I'm preparing for grad school, so I spend ~3 hrs./ day studying for the GMAT (yes, I know I could probably study more than that...but seriously, I have to FORCE myself to do even that...I could sit and stare at the wall to avoid having to study!) Ha, but really, once I get myself to study it goes pretty smooth & I enjoy it...it's just getting there. Kinda like exercise! What's with me & this whole rebelliousness against things I NEED to do, and enjoy doing, but DON'T????

Anyhow, so there's a couple people, Jason & Ernesto, in here that have been making my days easier. We've been battling at pool & dominoes, and I watch 'em play ping pong on occasion. One injured himself during bootcamp & is making some money until everything settles with that and he can return. The other is a really sweet, Jesus-found guy. They both have some of the most random comments, and are out right HILARIOUS! There's a bunch of crafts available to us, like material for dream-catchers, bird-houses, oil/ canvas painting, etc. Each of them made bird houses. Jason brings his out, and it's actually quite a work of art. Then Ernesto goes on telling me how his has 2-stories & a pulley-type elevator, etc. So of course me, "little miss gullible," responds "wow. show it to me!" Finally about 20 min. later, he comes out with this little 6"x6" box w/windows. I bout fell out of my seat it was so funny! And so did he, cuz he'd tricked me. So I guess no matter where I go, I'll always believe that "gullible is not in the dictionary" or have to think "when the War of 1812 was".... teeheehee! :-D

As for the study...nothing new. Same old sh**, different day. Only difference is, I started the weightloss phase 4 days ago and will now be consuming ONLY Ensure-Plus shakes for the next 6 weeks! Yep... breakfast = chocolate shake w/ multi-vitamin, lunch = strawberry shake, dinner = vanilla shake, and evening snack = ...........
wait for it!!!............
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..........another shake :) Bet you couldn't guess that one ;-)

I figured out yesterday that I could actually get some sugar-free/ fat-free jello or popsicles once in a while...... my fat butt bout did a back flip when I was givin' the life altering news! *LOL* And I mean litereally....you have no idea how exciting it is to know that you may actually be given something to chew on, when you're looking at almost 2 months of liquid-only consumption. But I gotta be honest...I don't regret my decision to do this study because the outcome will be favorable... $6,000 and bout 25 lbs. of weightloss. Most certainly better than being at home gaining weight. Probably better than walking around campus in my skimpies too ;-)... (oh yea, those that were there. Remember that random foreign exchange student that asked to take a picture with me??? I ran into him before I left to Phoenix, and it was soooo funny. He has the picture in his "Russian Facebook" as "life in the US" hahahaha)

K, so aside from that; back to the study....lemme tell you the most exciting part of the weightloss phase....I have to put these little white hats (pictured above) in the toilet bowl to collect my stool & urine...YES, I poo in a hat! I swallow a blue-dye capsule on Mondays and proceed to collect my feeces for bout 4 days. It works like this... poo in the plastic bag-lined hat, tie the bag, label the bag, put the poo bag in a ziploc bag, label that bag, put the ziploc in a plastic cylinder, label the cylinder, then put the cylinder in a styrofoam ice chest. Finally, I call the nurse and tell her "the package is ready for transplant!" I'm a POO DONOR! hehehehehe. No JK, I only said that once to the nurse :-D. Cuz it looks so funny when they walk down the hallway with my poo in the ice chest...it totally looks like delivery for an organ transplant. But get this...they BOMB my poo! It's freeze-dried and then lit on fire....man, I tell ya... I don't think I could spend my life with hopes of a career in "poo bombing." Especially MY poo. Ask Bart & Derek...they know.
Ok, so I think I've talked enough about my poo. Time to venture away from the computer and get some much needed studying done!

Week 2

Hey guys! So 2 weeks down, ~8 to go. This week was ok, probably one of the more grueling for testing, but I think it'll be smooth sailing (test-wise) from here on out. Today was kinda shitty, but I'll explain that later.
Anyhow, so on Monday I did a Doubly-Labeled Water (DLW) Test. It's to measure free-living energy use by measuring the amount of calories you burn under normal home cnoditions for a 7-day period. So, while fasting, I drank this special water that has extra-heavy hydrogren and oxygen atoms. Then, over a 4-5 hour period they collected urine samples. That was pretty easy. On Tuesday I had a "Fasting Chamber," which means I went into the chamber and did not eat at all for 24 hours. It wasn't bad; but on Friday, I had to do an "Overeating Chamber"...which was ROUGH! Cuz the food in the chamber is DISGUSTING, so even if I'm starving, I still cringe with every bite. It was a TON of food too. Thursday was probably the roughest day of them all...the muscle and fat biopsies. It wasn't horrible, but it was definitely something I would love to never do again. I'm still a little sore near the sites, but it's bearable. Oh ya, found out I have marbled fat...I told the doctor that "I'd be a very expensive chunk of meat for a cannibal" hardy har har! :-D
Anyhow, I got out of the overeating chamber this morning and here's where the drama started...
So, immediately after leaving the chamber, I'm weighed and then they draw 2 tubes of blood from me before breakfast. Today was the first time this nurse, Jenetta, started an IV to draw blood. So she inserts the needle and has a hard time getting blood out and asks me to relax. So though I already felt relaxed, I tried to relax even more. Still no luck. So she FREAKS out and starts telling me "If we can't draw your blood, then you'll have to leave the study!" I'm thinking "whoa nelly! How is it MY FAULT the blood won't come out???" Anyhow, so she proceeded to tell me that I'm too tense and my blood vessels are closing in response to it. I didn't say anything though, and just went along with it. So she left the room, came back with a heat pad, and I kept that on my arm for 10 minutes to help with the blood flow. Then she stuck me again in a different vein, and nothing came out...so she re-stuck me in the same vein as earlier, and blood came out perfectly fine. Funny, cuz I was MUCH more tense during the final blood draw than I was during the first. Anyhow, I didn't care much after it was over. I ate my breakfast and went about my day. Then, at dinner, I didn't eat my entire meal. I got in trouble for that. I wasn't aware that I was supposed to eat everything on the tray on days other than chamber days. But now I know, and it's cool. I also found out today that I may be discharged come Monday if I don't start eating all of my food (understandable), and that they have to stop getting complaints about me from Jenetta. I was totally caught off-guard with that. The nurse that explained everything to me is a really sweet lady and she told me that Jenetta was a complainer and told me that apparently Jenetta had been complaining that I was laggin in the mornings for weigh-in, and that I was freaking out before every test. I was soooo irate at this because 1) the second she comes in to wake us up and weigh us in, I'm out of bed, off to pee, then straight to get weighed (which is what we're supposed to do)... and 2) I've NEVER freaked out over a test. What the hell is there to freak out about?? I had a biopsy on Thursday which I was nervous for. But I didn't complain, or make the procedure hard, nothing! I did everything I was told. The morning of, I asked Jenetta what I should expect pain-wise, and she went off about how it was gonna hurt and then kept going on and on about how if I can't handle this, then I shouldn't be here. She went off like this for like 5 minutes...when it was a simple question that did not need such a rude and complex answer.
Well, needless to say, I'm at my wits end with this woman...and I honestly don't know what I've done wrong or what I've done to make her feel this way toward me. I was feeling ok about this 10-week stay in "solitary confinement"...but now, I can't get my mind off the fact that I'm gonna have to walk on egg-shells so that witch doesn't complain anymore, so I don't get kicked out......which of course, makes me feel like this stay is going to be a heck of alot more miserable than it should be...

Week 1

Hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July this year! Mine wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible. One of the nurses took us outside to watch a couple fireworks shows that were actually pretty cool. We NEVER get to leave the research floor, so believe me...going outside was like a fat kid eating a supersized Hershey bar! (mmmmmm, that sounds yummy...)

So Week-1 flew by pretty fast. I checked in on June 25th and had my first test the next day. The Dual X-Ray Absorptionetry (DXA) is a method of measuring body fat tissue. It's pretty much like a regular X-ray, where you lie on a table and this big arm moves down your body (head to toe) to get a complete scanned image of your bone structure and fat tissue. It was kinda funny when I saw the image, cuz it looked like this enormous marshmallow-creature (ME) swallowed a really skinny person! Hahahahaha!
Last weekend was spent being lazy; except I did take a GMAT diagnostic test in which I scored 69% (go figure). On Monday I did an Oral Glucose Tolerance Test, where they stuck me with an IV line, took like 10 blood samples, had me drink a really sweet orange soda-type drink (w/ 75 grams of dextrose in it), and then proceeded to take additional blood samples over a 3-hour period...which ended up being something ~15 tubes of blood. It wasn't bad, except, I realized that I absolutely hate IVs......woopie, I'm probably going to get stuck with 20 different IVs before I'm done here! hooray! Right...
Ok, on Tuesday I went into the Metabolic Chamber which wasn't too bad; boring, but not horrible. I'd say the worst part was collecting my urine. The smell of pee kinda makes me nautious, so our little secret...I sort of deprived myself of liquids that day cuz I didn't wanna keep peeing (hehe)...ya, wasn't so funny come bout 5 o'clock, when this POUNDING headache started and continued to persist at 10:30 that night...so of course I broke down and started chugging water & asked for some Tylenol. The headache finally went away around midnight, but of course after chugging 2 bottles of water in a 3-4 hr. span, I had to pee all night...so needless to say, I didn't sleep well. Anyhow, after leaving the chamber the next morning, I went for my MRI at St. Joseph's hospital downtown. Now, I'd had an MRI about 3 years ago & don't remember it being such a 'tight fit'...but now I know what Bart means by "I'm not closter phobic; it's just that the fatter I get, the smaller my surroundings are" *LOL*...so ya, if I could remember what it was like 27 years ago, I'd probably compare the MRI machine to that of the birth canal for a fetus...a rather 'tight fit.'
I went back into the chamber on Friday, which of course I drank water ALL DAY, and slept great that night. So it's Saturday now, and since there's virtually no tests on the weekends, there's not much to say about the wild weekend I'll be having :-D.

Anyhow, I love you guys. Nighty night!
*1 week down, 9 more to go*

All About The Study...

Hi everyone! So as most of you know, I voluntarily decided to admit myself into Solitary Confinement! AHHHHH! Jk Jk Jk :-D....Derek does refer to it as a "Solitary Confinement Diet." *LOL* But really, it's a clinical study at the Obesity and Diabetes Clinical Research Section of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), National Institue of Health, in Phoenix, AZ. So, in easier terms...I'm at the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. I'll be undergoing numerous tests while losing weight over the next 10 weeks. I figured I'd journal my stay and tell ya'll about the procedures I go through each week.

Here's a bit of an explanation about what it is that the NIH is studying, and what my typical day is like...

THE STUDY
The intent of the study is to determine if the way a person expends energy during overeating or fasting can predict how much weight a person will lose, in order to learn if certain people lose weight quicker than others.
Specific aims are:
(a)changes in the body's metabolism (or energy expenditure) with overeating ~2x as many calories as usual over 24 hrs., and with fasting over 24 hrs. predicts how much weight I will lose
(b)how other behavioral and hormonal measurements may relate to the changes in metabolism
(c)whether they can precisely measure how many calories I eat & excrete (in stool) and whether this can account for the weight that I lose.
Ultimately, this study will consist of 105 subjects, each of which will be studied over a 5 year period; including the 10-week inpatient stay and additional monthly to yearly visits over a 5 year period. During the 10-week stay, I'll undergo MRI and DXA scans for measurement of body fat & bone density, fat & muscle biopsies, measurement of free-living energy use, 11 overnight stays in a metabolic chamber, weekly stool & urine collection & blood draws, and weekly measurement of core temp. & physical acivity level using monitoring devices on all 4 limbs & around my waist.
The stay invloves 2 weeks of initial baseline studies (weight maintenance; which is the phase I'm in now) where most of the testing occurs, 6 weeks of weightloss (weightloss; liquid diet = Ensure Plus for EVERY mean...not looking forward to that, *LOL*), and 2 final maintenance weeks where I'll repeat everything I did during the initial baseline.

TYPICAL DAY
I wake up every morning around 5-5:30 am to get weighed, go back to sleep, and wake up for breakfast at 7:00 am. Depending on what sort of tests I'm doing that day, I usually stay awake throughout the morning for the testing because most tests are done right after breakfast. Blood draws are done in my room through an IV, and other scans & biopsies are done in their respective parts of the hospital. Lunch is served at 11:00 am, and I'm usually free to roam the floor for the rest of the day. Dinner is at 4:00 pm, with a snack at 7:00 pm. All meals are served in my room or in the lounge, depending on where I'm at. I shower in the evenings because most tests don't allow showering in the morning because you either can't be wet for the test, or you're too weak to shower because you've had so much blood drawn, *LOL*.
On the days that I'm in the Metabolic Chamber, I get weighed as usual, then swallow this big ol' horse pill that monitors my body temperature as it travels thru my body and relays the temp. to an external device that I wear around my belt. On these mornings, I usually have a fasting blood draw right before breakfast, eat around 7:30 am, and enter the chamber at 8:00 am with my pillow, 3 movies, 3 sodas, and some water. I stay in the chamber for 24 hours, while collecting all of my urine throughout the 24-hr. period into these orange jugs (kept in the refrigerator...YUK). Then when I get out the next morning, I do another fasting blood draw, eat breakfast, and then go on to that days tests.


Well, there's the details of the study... I'll start posting pics here when I can & hope ya'll keep in touch. Hope you enjoy "Life With Sara in Solitary Confinement!" :-D