Before I get into all the gory details of everything that transpired at the NIH clinical trial last week, I wanted to share my unique lodging experience at the Bolger Hotel & Conference Center<\/a>, which was originally constructed in the early 1980s as a training facility for U.S. Postal Service employees, and recently taken over by the Dolce Hotels and Resorts group. Given that hotel rooms in the vicinity of the NIH are at a premium in terms of both availability and price, and that the lodging stipend extended to trial participants is a modest $50\/night, I felt very fortunate to happen upon this hotel, given that it’s a mere five miles from the NIH yet runs barely a few bucks more than the stipend amount. Plus, it’s located on 83 acres of private forested grounds with a 1.5 mile walking\/jogging trail, two fitness centers and a pool, and–most importantly–complimentary wired and wireless Internet access.<\/p>\n So what’s not to like? Well… because it’s more of a conference center than it is a hotel, it was lacking in a lot of the typical amenities common to most hotels. Like employees, and room service, and vending machines, and a place to purchase goods and sundries, and a mini-fridge or microwave in the room; those sorts of things. Perhaps that’s because there was literally no room in the room to accommodate even the smallest of appliances–or anything else for that matter.<\/p>\n I’m certainly not the “road warrior” type who’s stayed in hundreds of hotels as a function of my job, but I have done quite a bit of traveling over the years, and I have to say, I’ve never seen a hotel room as small as this one. It was essentially the size of the bed (a double), with just enough space added on either side to be able to get in and out of it. There was a padded desk chair and a very shallow desk at which to work, but it was virtually impossible to move the chair back far enough to get up without being blocked by the foot of the bed, so I had to crab-walk the chair sideways towards the bathroom in order to escape.<\/p>\n As the extremely polite and professional front desk clerk informed me, since the rooms were originally designed to house hundreds of postal employees for training purposes, the emphasis was on efficiency, not on spaciousness or comfort. Given that I wasn’t there for a vacation, and that everything else about the place was more than satisfactory, I’lll just have to remember to request the room dimensions next time I’m ready to book my hotel for an upcoming clinical trial \ud83d\ude09 Come to think of it, maybe now we have a more definitive explanation for the phenomenon known as “going postal.”<\/p>\n Officially known as the Chronic Graft vs. Host Disease (cGVHD) Natural History Protocol, the trial in which I participated began way back in 2004 and will continue until the investigators have seen approximately 600 cGVHD patients. Only one participant per week takes part in the festivities, so I was feeling very special as all the physicians, investigators and techs were totally focused on me for the entire four-day period. The schedule of tests and consults was extremely tight and allowed very little room for error, much less for eating lunch or returning emails, but everything needs to be completed in that period of time as they don’t want to be dragging participants back there for any do-overs. Besides, in the immortal words of Gordon Gekko<\/a>: “Lunch? You gotta be kidding. Lunch is for wimps.”<\/p>\n Things started off less than auspiciously before I ever got inside the hospital; the NIH is a Federal facility and as such they are required to (very thoroughly) inspect every vehicle that enters, and of course mine is always filled with boxes and boxes of computer parts and audio cables and hard drives and all manner of tech paraphernalia that would have had to be taken out of the van and individually X-rayed by the security staff ;-( A very helpful member of their team suggested I simply back out, find a space on the street and walk in, which turned out to be my modus operandi for the entire week. Otherwise, my schedule would probably have blown before the trial even got started.<\/p>\nThe cGVHDetails<\/h4>\n