Four-year-old donates her body to science, for a couple hours

Wires sprout in all directions from her curly blonde hair. Beneath them, Daisy’s big blue eyes stare pensively at the camera. Another year has passed and again there sat my granddaughter in child-sized hospital scrubs undergoing a very thorough physical.

What does this child, who celebrated her fourth birthday recently, need from the medical world that requires attaching electronic monitors all over her head?

The pictures showed up on my Facebook feed last week. Her mother wrote that they “did a baseline to see what her resting brain waves looked like. She watched three sets of series of pictures. She was to watch for flowers amid pictures of people’s faces and a blurry picture of nothing. There were also three sets of 47 silly sentences mixed among normal sentences such as, “My pen is out of ink.” And “The boy fed his hair” etc. She had an hour plus of brain lab tests with those electrodes – all while a movie plays, sometimes with volume, sometimes without.”

All this and more just before her birthday because four years ago her mother and father agreed to allow her development to be studied in exchange for diapers while she needed them and a check for her savings account when she didn’t.

In seeking ways to stretch the family budget, and because she lives in Little Rock and science intrigues her, my daughter finds and applies to participate in non-invasive medical studies.

As an infant, her big brother, Eli, also participated in a BMI (Body Mass Index) study. The “Pea Pod Study” required a daily diet log from his mom who fed him naturally and frequent visits for body measurements in the body pod. Payment for his visits came in the form of free disposable diapers. (Bottle fed babies received formula.)

She also found a study that compared asthmatic and normal lungs when Eli was little. Eli went to be studied as part of the normative group of healthy lungs. After listening to his lungs, the pulmonologist said, “He sounds like he has asthma.” His pediatrician agreed with the diagnosis and prescribed medicine.

Remembering all those free diapers, Momma found a similar study for Daisy – a long-term study of the differences between breast-fed and bottle fed babies.

She began her visits as a 2 month old. Her mother answered a lot of questions about the family history, social structure and educational background. Daisy underwent physical measurements frequently through her first year and then a yearly assessment of her mental and physical development.

So, every year as her birthday approaches this little girl gets a whole afternoon of attention focused just on her.

First, she dons the scrubs: last year yellow, this year turquoise and begins with a basic measurement of her height and weight. She smiled and stood up as tall as she could when the nurse lined her up with the ruler on the wall to see how much she had grown in the last year. Being in the top 10 percent for her age she closely matches her petite big sister, Caroline, who stays in the bottom 10 percent. Though two years apart in age, but they often share clothes.

In another picture Daisy lies very still as the arch of a machine glides above and beneath her measuring her entire skeleton. Later she went through a magnetic tunnel that measures her body mass.

Finally, her momma wrote, “Right now I’m behind a one way glass watching Daisy. She’s in the “psych” portion of the visit. She’s been in there playing ‘games’ forever because she just keeps answering questions correctly. Smarty-pants.”

What else? After all she is the child of a mother addicted to dispensing accurate facts and information and uses every opportunity to teach. For instance,

After a nap Daisy came in with a bag of Cheetos. My daughter recorded the following conversation with her.

“I asked Daisy how many more she was planning on eating. She flashed some numbers on her fingers and ended with her fingers in an 0.”

“100?” I asked.

“No, zero,” she replied. “Oh, so none,” I concluded. “Does zero mean none?” “Yep.” “Then 100,” the child concluded and grabbed a handful.

Seeing the pictures of the yearly exam, I asked, “Does it bother her?”

“She does like the testing. She likes the attention paid to her. We emphasized the money will go in her savings account so she can maybe buy a car one day,” her mom responded.

Well maybe an older, used car. It isn’t really all that much, just enough to justify an afternoon of getting measured and playing games to advance the cause of science.


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