Update from Glen Foster

As we posted a few weeks back, team member Glen Foster has been preparing for an expedition to a research station in Nepal to conduct high altitude experiments on human physiology. Glen sent us an update on his progress.

Hey gang….Am back in Vancouver (temporarily) in the final stages of preparation for my trip to Nepal’s Pyramid Laboratory. I just wanted to give a brief update on what I have been up to over the past 4 months and the upcoming month and a half.

I have spent the last few months living on a lovely golf course in Kelowna and working at UBC’s Okanagan campus. My main job was instructing an exercise physiology course for third year students in the School of Health and Exercise Sciences. But most of my time was preoccupied for a 4 week period conducting baseline studies for our expedition to Nepal. The research we have been conducting is an assessment of brain, heart, and lungs during exercise, during alterations in arterial blood gases, and during pharmacological manipulations. I’ve attached several photos to this email to show how ‘fun’ this really is. Last week I had a catheter in my esophagus, my radial artery, and my internal jugular vein. The things we do for science… and an all inclusive trip to Nepal and the base camp of Everest. Although I get to be a subject in these studies I was also stupid enough to dream up some of them. A device I built to control arterial blood gases is a critical technology for our studies and involves us shipping fifteen 150lbs cylinders of O2, CO2, and N2 to our laboratory at 5,050m. These 15 cylinders left Vancouver a couple of weeks ago…will hopefully be through customs by the time I arrive and will be flown by helicopter 3/4 of the way to the pyramid. Yaks will be responsible for carrying these cylinders the rest of the way. Now hopefully I did the math right to ensure we have enough gases to carry out all of our studies.

Here is a blog that you may be interested in following about our research and it should be updated periodically throughout our trip.

I hope all is well and that you’re aren’t too busy these days.

All the best,

Glen Foster,  Ph.D