My story about human guinea pigs is up on the Wired site, here.
A note of correction: the print version of the story, in its final section, says that I thought about quitting after a series of unsuccessful blood draws by a nurse named Christina. That is wrong. The only time Christina drew blood from me was during the screening. Christina and the other nurses were totally professional and really nice throughout, but my highly active sympathetic nervous system caused my veins to close up a lot.
At one point, Lynda Frassetto, the researcher in charge of the study, changed the standard 3-failed-draws maximum to one for me because I was having such a tough time. Then the study stopped for 3 weeks, giving me a chance to regroup and to draw some fortitude from the stories of lab rats in Bob Helms' Guinea Pig Zero anthology. When I went back, I had a different attitude about having blood drawn (it's part of the job, not something nasty happening to me), and the draws were much more successful.
