Cookie cutter
Last uni holidays, being too lazy to actually get a real job I mostly just sat around, that is until I heard I could earn $3000 for being a medical guineapig! result! Me and five friends got in on this, and it paid for my holiday around Europe. It was a trial to test toxicity of a wound healing drug for use on diabetic ulcers, eye injuries, and other wounds that just won't heal. So to test a wound healing drug, they must of course wound us...

So, first day, they pull out a ridiculously large, thick needle and proceed to inject local anaesthetic in my upper thigh, maybe eight times per leg? (this oddly was the most painful part, because a real doctor had to do it as nurses weren't qualified enough to... inject things? and he only ever did injections on people that were already under general. He would often stick it in and wiggle it around a bit in between squirts deep inside my goddam leg, pumping me so full it created a skin volcano with lava flows of anaesthetic. Fucker!)
Then they came along with a 1mm hole punch thing and took six biopsies per leg in a line, maybe 50mm deep, before applying the drug to the holes.
THEN the big scary cookie cutter thing came out (1cm diameter, 50mm deep), and they biopsied out the first hole. Odd to feel the pressure of this guy pushing this thing into your leg, and then see it slide neatly into you like cookie dough, before they pull it out with tweezers and *snip* *snip* *snip* through your flesh with nail scissors to seperate it (sounded a bit like cutting through steak with kitchen shears). Then they took the little cylinders of my flesh (looking abit like chunks of frankfurter in tomato sauce) and baggied them; presumably for later study in a dimly lit lab already stocked with hundreds of little flesh tubes, by an man with a hunch and facial disfigurements.
He then stitched up the hole in the same cack-handed way, trying out different stitching techniques on us for kicks. Four hours later, the same for the next hole down, then the next two over the following week. They took photos and changed dressings over the next month, during which we couldn't get the wounds wet, so no showers; and we all walked like old men to avoid stretching out our painful stitched up holes.

One year later I have a nice line of circular scars on both upper thighs, its ended by career in swimsuit modelling, but lets be honest that wasn't really getting anywhere anyway by virtue of being skinny and hairy. I still haven't come up with a good story for the scars, a very precisely aligned alligator perhaps?

Apologies for length, would only be about 4 inches if you laid them out in a row.
(Terminus, Tue 16 Mar 2010, 11:00, 2 replies)

So, was it worth it?
$3000 for those scars? Let us know if it was worth it, in retrospect.
(EuroSong I love horse meat: best of all the animals, Tue 16 Mar 2010, 18:36, closed)

At the moment I'd say it was, I got a great holiday, a great story, and a permanent reminder of my poor student days to motivate me to get a proper job. I'll let you know in 30 years if I still feel the same way.
(Terminus, Thu 18 Mar 2010, 0:25, closed)