Ur-ine for it.

See what I did there?!?!

I'm sorry. I just couldn't help myself. Sometimes a bad pun is just right there, you know? And heads up, if you were expecting a potty-training or pregnancy post, you are about to be disappointed. This is much, much weirder.

One of the strange things about medical school is how casually you begin to take your body. When I was pregnant with Grace, for example, any of the guys we hung out with wanted nothing to do with anything pregnancy related. They did not want to know if I was nauseas, hear about any symptoms, and only if they were related or very close friends did they care if the baby was kicking.

And then we got to med school.

Charlie's pregnancy was very different. Suddenly I had (mostly male) med students asking me interested, clinical questions all the time. They wanted to talk to me about why I peed all the time (like, including the length of the female ureter and the chemical/physiological changes during pregnancy). They could discuss my fundal measurements (the size of the uterus) and, at the end, wanted to know how dilated I was. It was suddenly no big deal.

So after years of stuff like that, it seemed like no biggie to get involved in a research study where we had to have our blood drawn and collect our urine for sampling. (What the WHAT, right?!) But when it actually came down to it, it was pretty weird.

For the past couple of months Steve and I have been involved in a research project at Wake studying the effect of Omega 3's on oxalates in your urine (basically, they were checking to see if fish oil would help decrease your chance of getting kidney stones). It went like this:

Month One: Give blood sample. Collect urine for 3 days. I'm not talking a cupful like you pee out at the doctor's office sometimes. I'm talking about all the urine you have in you for 3 days. They gave us these jugs to... you know. And they wanted every drop. So Steve had to carry his to school in his backpack. Awkward.

(Are you questioning our friendship right now?)

Diet: For the rest of the month we were on a "washout" diet to get all the Omega 3's out of our systems. We ate normally, but were not allowed to eat certain fish, nuts, and a couple other things high in Omega 3's.

5 Day Controlled Diet: After the first month, we had to eat a controlled diet prepared at the research facility for us for five days. I would go over in the mornings and pick up our food for the day, all prepackaged into paper bags. We were not allowed to eat anything but what was in those bags (including bottles of water they sent home--and we were to drink only from those bottles), and, even harder, we had to eat/drink everything they sent home, whether we liked it or not. And some of it, we did not. Steve struggled with the sweet potatoes. I battled my gag reflex swallowing the icky canned peaches. But we made it through.

There were two menus, which alternated days. One was pretty good, the other was the day we dreaded. Neither was that great--it was basically packaged cafeteria food (yum-o)--but when we got through day 4, the second of the icky-food days, we got really excited that the last day was more bearable. During the last three days of the diet, we collected more urine (poor Steve sloshing along to school with pee in his backpack...) and on the final day each gave another blood sample. (Luckily they did not want all the blood we produced for those three days...)

It was: So. Much. Food.

For both sessions of this diet, we ended up having to eat these meals over a weekend--but of course the lab isn't open on weekends, so I had to bring home three days worth of paper bags:

And cram them into my fridge:

Those bags are in layers. They go all the way to the back of the fridge. AND there are some in the freezer, too. And as I'm looking at this picture I also realize that we have a TON of different salad dressings in the door. Hmm.

Month Two: For the second month we could eat anything we wanted, but we had to take 2 fish oil capsules every morning and every night. Not so bad.

Another 5 Day Controlled Diet: I'm not sure if it was better or worse, knowing what we'd be eating. It was harder to remember not to eat extra food the second time around--I had no idea how frequently I reach for snacks! And of course we got invited to a movie party where we couldn't eat any of the candy or treats. So sad. We adjusted to the food a little quicker, I think, but also couldn't wait to be done so we could just eat a Chipotle burrito again. We actually made a list of all the food we were going to eat the day after we finished. Though we both agreed that it was nice not to have to cook for a couple of days!

And of course, three more days of urine collection followed by a blood sample. I have never felt like my urine was so valuable before. The women in the research unit actually thanked me for my urine when I brought it in! Haha. I laughed and told them to enjoy it. The kids were basically celebrities in the research unit by the time we'd finished, and one of the ladies told me she thought we should just keep coming back every day. When we finished, I took a photo of our final urine jugs, which you saw above. Awwww.

Aren't we so caring and thoughtful to do all this?

No.

Research studies pay money! We should come in around $900 (together) for doing all this. Not bad for eating and peeing, both of which we were planning to do anyway. We're not sure yet if we're going to buy something fun, use it for a trip, or put it in the second-car fund, but $900 for a couple gallons of pee and a few days of eating weird food seemed like a good idea at the time.

Oh, those Waltons. What will they get up to next?