The Full Frame

I have been doing clinical research for two years now and yet it feels like an eternity. I have learned so much during this time that I have become very confident in not only my level of clinical understanding but also my understanding of medication function and interaction and have gained more than my fair share of the overall savvy required to succeed at this job…

It all started on October 1st, 2007 when I began my first day of work at the hospital. I was shown into my office, a corner office without a window roughly 15ft x 20ft. And nothing,… wait I shouldn’t go that far… it had a computer at least, a modern dell with a 19″ LCD screen. This was placed on a card table which was sitting in the corner of the room and next to that a stack of boxes which I was told contained some office supplies and binders for patients.

From there I was on my own. I was armed with the names of two people with jobs roughly similar to mine and some great advice from one of my future mentors (who also would happen to be my boss).

Upon calling my associates I was given a brief rundown of how difficult, random, tedious and time consuming this position was. I was given some sample binders and folders to show me the data collected. From that point on I was on my own.

At this point it began to sink in. I was going to be experimenting on human beings. The same type of things I was doing in the lab I would now be doing with actual people. You can’t exactly restart a human experiment if something goes wrong, you can’t take a coffee break and re-run your samples, and you must certainly write everything down!!!

Step 1. Review my sample documents.

Upon opening a sample binder I was greeted by a table of contents and a medication approval sheet which showed exactly what medication the subject was on, the storage requirements for said medication, and the list of approved prescribers.

Looking more closely at the table of contents I saw that each visit the subject was supposed to come back for was neatly outlined in a large table with what tests we had to preform on them during each visit. All acronyms, the only thing that I could recognize in the table were the headings listed 1-13 across the top of the table and then a bold black “X” denoting the row and corresponding acronym that this study coordinator was supposed to follow.

Ok.

Flipping through the pages I encountered huge multi-page psychological tests, dozen page memory batteries, and scribble over each and every page. The coordinator had taken the time to painstakingly hand number and initial each page of this entire document. Wow, what a waste of time. Surely there must be a better way than this.

Setting the sample binder aside I began to unpack my boxes to see what treasures lay inside. Binders. Ten boxes of binders. Sixty in total. Stapler, yes. Pencil sharpener, yes. Sticky notes, yes. Pens? Nope.

Step 2. Office Space?

So the first thing I needed was a place to put all my supplies, because a room with only a card table isn’t very suitable as an office. I began asking around if I could get a file cabinet or another cabinet or another table moved into my room so that I might put things some of my things away. My boss was kind enough to give me his desk organizer so that I might at least have some place to put my paperclips and small items for the time being instead of them rolling around my desk. Back to the matter at hand… furniture. So after numerous replies of “you have to buy it,” and “I don’t know.” I was confronted with another option,… “Go to the basement and check the hallways, people put furniture down there that they no longer need, you can just take it.” I didn’t really know if this was true or not, but I knew that if I was going to have anything at all in my office I was going to need to do something, and fast.

I took the elevator down to the basement and discovered….. a lot of junk. File cabinets from the 1950s, furniture from the 70’s, years of labeling stickers attached one over the other in an attempt to gain control over mind boggling government forms and regulations….

I guess this will have to do. I found a plywood cabinet two and a half feet high tall with two solid doors and a shelf inside. Its wood vernier looked dull and lifeless as if crying out for a rest after countless years of hard service. Satisfied with my new cabinet I looked around a bit more and was able to also find a 6ft tall brown filing cabinet that spoke out from amidst the other,… what luck, its original set of keys were taped neatly inside the top drawer.

Excellent. Without much hassle I found a janitor who was nice enough to help me on my quest for furniture and told me that he would get a flatbed hand cart and take them up to my office in an hour or so.

Houston, we have furniture!