Kate - Interview 13  

Kate - Interview 13

Age at Interview: 38
Sex: Female
Background: Kate is Operations Director for a charity. She is married with no children. Ethnic background/nationality: White New Zealander.

Brief outline:Kate and her husband took part in a trial comparing injections of grass pollen antigen against a placebo as a way to reduce hay fever. Kate was in the experimental group and her husband in the placebo group.

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Female
There was a small risk from the injections of anaphylactic shock, but there were safety precautions in place. They kept a diary to report other reactions such as local swelling.

 



The main thing with the trial was that we were getting injected with grass pollen or a placebo. So we were randomised to either get the injection with the grass pollen, or get just an injection of nothing, really. And we didn’t know, and the nurse who was running the trial, he didn’t know either. And he had some assistants as well. And so no one knew whether we were on the grass pollen or on the placebo. We had to stay in the hospital for an hour after the administration of the injection, because they explained to us from the outset that one of the possible side effects, of an injection of something you’re allergic to, is that you go into anaphylactic shock [laugh]. And so they had a doctor always on site and stores of adrenalin. It was a precautionary measure but a quite interesting thought. But it was nice to know that they’d put that level of thought and care into it. And obviously it was part of them getting permission to do the study. So we would go in, we’d get gradually increasing levels of the grass pollen injected throughout the spring. So at the beginning you noticed very little local reaction from the injection, but as you got closer to your maximum strength of the dosage, towards May, I noticed certainly a local reaction, a swelling on my arm. And we were asked to monitor any reaction and tell them, like measure the size of the reaction, the lump that appeared, how itchy it was. So we’d feed that back to them. And throughout this whole period, and then throughout the entire summer, we kept a daily diary of our symptoms. But we didn’t have to go into the hospital during the summer months. So that made it a little easier and less of a time commitment. And we would pop into the hospital I think probably twice over the summer to drop diaries off and pick up new diaries, and so the nurse could discuss with us any issues we were having with the diaries.

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