On: The runs in Mexico - The Diarrhoeas of a Medical Triallist

So there I was, suddenly being offered a free trip to Mexico. It seemed too good to be true; surely there must be a catch? Of course there was; there's always a catch.

The trip, you see, was part of a clinical trial being conducted by a pharmaceutical company. An unsettling prospect to most, clinical trials, conjuring up things going horribly wrong and you ending up with a third ear growing out of your heart, or something. Nonetheless, this seemed pretty legit – the trial was more concerned with stopping faecal malfunction than mutating your cardiovascular system. It was for an anti-diarrhoea drug that had reached its final stages of testing, and the final stages of testing involved feeding it to feebly constituted Europeans, packing them off to Mexico and then keeping an eye on their comings and, more pertinently, their goings. It seemed reasonable enough to me; you’re likely to be playing Russian roulette with your innards if you go anywhere with a different diet, so why not give their miracle cure a whirl?

To take advantage I was required to make a few clinic visits to deepest Clydebank, where I would be administered the dope and given further instructions. The nature of the drug they were testing meant my bowel movements were of great interest to them. Which was an odd experience. The doctor qestioning me was a dry, serious man but I’m sure he was close to laughter when he asked me how well my stool kept its shape once it hit the water. These are hard things to put into words if you've never tried. My main task for the weeks ahead was to keep a diary, outlining the regularity and firmness of my stools. Slightly more ominously, I also agreed that if I passed anything with the consistency of soft scoop ice cream (that was the straight-faced doctor’s expression, not mine) I would pop it in sample jar and call for a courier to whisk it off to the lab.

Reading through the paragraph I’ve just written, I can understand that some people might find the whole process a little, ah, intrusive. In reality, it caused very little annoyance. The diary was straightforward, indeed it was rather informative to look back over my movements throughout the previous month. For the record, August the 17th was a very interesting day but I'm not comfortable sharing the specifics.

As for the stool sampling, well I can appreciate that it sounds pretty unpleasant. To be more accurate it sounds bloody disgusting. I dodged a bullet though, in that the situation never arose where I had to bag up my own filth. Not everyone would be so lucky, but to redress the balance somewhat, participants get a small bonus for every sample that they produce. A fellow experimentee that I ran into in Mexico boasted to me that he’d already made about £150 from calling a courier to come out and pick up little packages of his faeces. An unconventional way to make a few quid, sure, but I suppose one has to work with the gifts the Lord gives one.

A fortnight after the clinic visit, I set off for Mexico with Charlotte, my travelling partner and fellow experimentee, stool diaries and sample kits in hand. Romantic. One of the conditions of the trial was that we were obliged to stay in one place for the first week (within shitting distance of one of the organisers’ labs.) This meant that we spent the first 7 days in the southern city of Oaxaca.

Which was fine, because if your movements are to be restricted you may as well be in Oaxaca. Oaxaca’s a small city but it’s pretty and it’s vibrant. A week is maybe a bit of a stretch, but there’s plenty enough sights in the city to keep anyone amused for a couple of days. It’s pretty interesting from a digestive perspective too. Its culinary speciality is chapulines, or fried grasshoppers. I was pretty unenthusiastic about sampling this supposed delicacy, but curiosity got the better of me, and I eventually hunkered down to a stuffed roast pepper. I flipped the pepper open and, wow, I saw an unco sight! I was unprepared for the mind-blowing number of grasshoppers that could fit inside a single pepper. It was a veritable grasshopper apocalypse. I managed to subsume my guilt and eat the blighters, though predictably, my part in this genocide brought about my least formed stool of the trip (though I didn’t deem it worthy of the sample jar and courier treatment). Damned natural justice.

Freed from our week long internment in Oaxaca, we headed for the Pacific coast. By the time we reached Puerto Escondido I had become increasingly confident about the ability of my drug-reinforced stomach to handle whatever Mexico could throw at it. Seafood from grubby beachside shacks? I processed them with exemplary aplomb. Lurid green soups with unidentified floaters and flies hovering nearby? A delight both to eat and to pass. Curious beverages with three parts lager and one part salsa? I went back for more. And more.

Alas, Charotte would not be so lucky. At some stage, something in Mexico disagreed with her and she suffered from the very symptoms that the drug was supposed to dispel. Perhaps she received a placebo, and was thus incapable of replicating my iron-bellied feats, or perhaps she’s just a delicate little one. In any case, medical science is unlikely to provide an explanation since she took the decision to cop out of the stool sampling part of the experiment. An understandable course of action; bagging up your shit isn’t a barrel of laughs at the best of times, but it becomes an extremely uninviting proposition when you’re too nauseous to walk. I might add that her boyfriend’s singular refusal to assist her in the sample collecting process made it even less likely to happen.

In any case, neither she nor I appear to have incurred any long term damage (Charlotte returned to regularity soon after returning). Our dealings with the trial organisers were trouble-free too. They organised the trip, and logistically it was fine: we were booked on the correct flights, put up in a fairly classy hotel, paid our expenses on time – the whole thing was as effortless as passing soft scoop ice cream.