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Endurance runners

i got the first dose and almost immediately fainted. they had to call in a whole medical team and it was a huge fucking deal

i was kicked out of the study and got a phone call later where they were supposed to tell me what the drug was, so i could avoid it in the future. they told me it was saline water. a placebo. i fainted from the placebo effect.

anyway, it's been a few months and i just got an email from the same department asking me to be a research participant in a new study: testing the effects of open-label placebo.

open label placebo is when the subjects and the researchers all know it's a placebo. they're testing the power of my mind. my power to imagine anything.

i was partway through answering a question when i felt a rush of heat travel up my core. i said out loud "...whoa. that's strong." and then my head dropped. the grad student called everybody in and they leaned back my chair, blood pressure cuff, etc etc.

they called in the MD who did the whole "do you know where you are? do you know where you work?" questionnaire. i got confused and couldn't answer where I worked for like 10 seconds.

because this was a double-blind study, they were also convinced that i'd had an adverse reaction to the opioid, and that i wasn't safe to go home. they made me stay over an hour until "all the effects" had worn off and for my confusion to go away. i was completely experiencing opioid-like loopy-ness paired with weak muscle sensations. it was fucking wild.

There is only one (or rather two) itty bitty teeny winnie problem, he is already the twins guardian at the time and he must do everything in his power not to let Wymack figure it out because surely this kind kind sweet men will kick them out of he finds that the Shinning twins are freeloading in his school.

And Neil’s ribs are a half-broken puzzle in his chest. He forgets, most of the time, but Andrew doesn’t — when he runs his hands over Neil’s bare chest, he feels the minute bumps and divots where the bones beneath his skin have fractured and healed all wrong. There’s a brokenness there that he carries around with him everywhere.

In the kitchen, Andrew has his hand on Neil’s side as he reaches up to grab something from a top cabinet. His t-shirt and skin stretch with him, moving over those broken places, and Andrew feels or maybe imagines the way his scarred skin catches on the ridges. He wonders how it doesn’t hurt. Maybe it does, and Neil’s just forgotten that too.