^{I Was a Middle-Aged Human Subject}

I am all about the science, so when Yale-New Haven Hospital called a week before my daughter's eye surgery to ask me to participate in a study about parent pre-operative anxiety, I said sign me up.

A fat packet of questionnaires arrived in the mail a few days later. The first one was designed to measure my present anxiety level, and it was a breeze, because at that particular moment I could answer in all truthfulness that I was not feeling anxious, rattled, unhappy, nervous, or any of the other twentysomeodd adjectives they'd Rogeted up. The next questionnaire seemed designed to provoke anxiety, nervousness, fear -- perhaps even despair. It asked me to vividly imagine some frightening scenarios and check off what I would do in response. For example, I was to imagine undergoing a lengthy and bloody dental procedure. Would I: try to go to sleep; watch the dentist closely; anticipate pain, etc. I'm not actually afraid of the dentist, so I imagined I was facing labor and delivery all over again and answered accordingly. The next scenario had me held hostage by terrorists in a public building. Would I: try to go to sleep; swap life stories with the other hostages; watch the terrorists very closely, especially their weapons; listen to the radio coverage of the event; make sure I knew where all the exits were, etc. Scenario three involved traveling on an airplane that dramatically loses altitude, then levels off. By this point I was refusing to vividly imagine these horrible things, because it was shortly before bedtime and I didn't need anything upsetting my already tenuous ability to sleep through the night.

The next set of questions probed my feelings about my child going under the anesthesia. Now, she'd been under general anesthesia once before, and it went fine, so I was not particularly anxious. But as I answered that question in the24 different ways it was posed, and found myself at the low end of the Likert scale with every answer, I began to worry if I am a bad parent because I'm not worried enough. Or were they trying to tell me in an extremely subtle way that Yale-New Haven Hospital's anesthesiologists are not so good? Next came a questionnaire designed to measure the overall stability of my personality. Thanks a lot - couldn't they have put this one first, before I was held imaginary-hostage and was led to question my child's medical care? Faced with questions like: Are you even-tempered? (Always / Often / Sometimes / Rarely), I wondered: do they mean at home or at work? Because there is a difference. There are good reasons for the difference. At work, nobody fake-pinches anybody else just to get a rise out of them. And nobody lapses into baby talk just to get a rise out of me. And even the sloppiest of my co-workers doesn't leave their crap in the middle of the floor where I am sure to trip over it. So it's easy to be even-tempered at work. I started worrying about the discrepancy between my home self and my work self. If I answered this questionnaire as my work self, and then went back and answered it as my home self, would the two sets of answers fall on opposite ends of the scale? And if they did, am I bipolar, or just a bad parent, and why can't I just chill? I glanced back at the instruction to answer these questions without thinking about them too much and answered everything "Sometimes," which was true of almost every question, if I didn't think about it too much.

With the interrogation over, it was time to put on the "watch," which was not really a watch. It just looked like a watch, with the hands permanently stuck at 5:00. I typically wear a watch during the day, so I kept glancing at this fake watch as if it would really tell me the time. (Are you easily annoyed by inconsequential things? Sometimes.) It must have be measuring physiological signs of stress -- pulse, at least, maybe perspiration? I'm not sure exactly what. Could it record my thoughts? (Do you ever feel paranoid? Only when wearing a creepy not-watch without knowing what it does.) I was to wear it thirty minutes before going to bed and thirty minutes after waking up, and also to keep a sleep log. I had to write down what time I thought I fell asleep (this was like a hex, because once I started thinking about what time I might fall asleep, I couldn't fall asleep), any time I woke during the night (and for how long, and why), and what time I woke in the morning. On several nights, the box in which I was to record the night's sleeping and waking wasn't big enough for all the details. I knew I wasn't a great sleeper, but was I really that bad? Or was the act of having to record it making it worse? If I woke from a nightmare at 2:12 a.m., sweating and heart pounding, was the watch noting the time (inside, where I couldn't see it) as well as the physiological symptoms, and would the researchers late square it with what I'd written in the log? Better be sure to have sex before I put on the watch, because if I'm wearing it, they'll know I had sex, and if I wear it for a little while, and then take it off for a little while, and then put it back on, they'll know I had sex, and it would be embarrassing if I didn't have it off for long enough. (Do you work yourself into a frenzy over-analyzing hypothetical situations? Shut up.)

On the day of the surgery, there were more questionnaires, plus blood pressure readings and saliva samples as soon as we got to the hospital. I dispatched those calmly and quickly, before the surgeon arrived. Then he sailed in, and said, "So! Today we are doing the left eye." Uh... no, pal, two weeks ago you decided to do the right eye. We had some back and forth about this, and he consulted the chart, on which he had written "LE" in one place, and "RE" in another. Then he looked at my daughter's all over again, said it didn't really make any difference which eye they did, and finally attempted to be reassuring by making a pen mark above her right eye. So after she went into the OR, and I went back out to the waiting room, and the researcher came back for more saliva and blood pressure and a questionnaire, I was pretty worked up. Indeed, my blood pressure had shot up, my saliva had a much higher concentration of venom than usual, and I checked off "5," the highest possible response, for all the questions about my current anxiety level.

I thought, "They don't understand! My parental pre-operative anxiety isn't due to my fears about my kid going under anesthesia -- I'm freaked from talking to the surgeon! This study doesn't control for the human subject's pre-op encounter with the surgeon! How can it be valid?!" But I guess they can't control for every variable, like: am I not sleeping because I followed instructions and imagined personal encounters with terrorists, or do my physiological stress reactions spike because I had sex while wearing the watch, or do my answers on the questionnaire indicate that I am a welter of contradictions because I can't face answering every single one of them honestly.

After another five days of wearing the watch post-surgery, I packed it and the questionnaires up and sent it all back to the hospital. I am now waiting for my $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate -- token compensation, like getting a mug when you pledge $40 to public television. Of course, you're not paying $40 for a mug, you're giving to public television, and in the same way, I wasn't selling my labor for a gift certificate, I was saying, you go, science, and I will help you get there. And if you want my help again, it'll cost you at least $50.

(Do you get yourself all worked up by re-living stressful experiences? Stop, just stop, I beg you / Often / Sometimes / La-la-la-la-I-don't-hear-you.)