Day 16

First off, let me mention that I have eleven ant bites on my left shoulder blade. I also realized why all of the people at Damien keep wanting to put braids in my hair. It's because I show up to work with a giant bun in my hair, which my cousin says is not at all fashionable. I also am being a total hypochondriac about having TB. 

I feel stupid for not knowing his name since I sit in his office for so many hours every day, but today he showed me how to spot TB bacilli on the microscope. 

The red thingies. 

Peter stopped by to show me an old newsletter from Damien. I was confused why he showed it to me until a minute later I spotted my grandfather on the far right of this picture. Wooh!

He prepared more slides. He told me he hadn't seen this sort of lab equipment till he started working formally. I told him I had started using this type of equipment in the eighth grade. I never realized Indian science education doesn't have a practical element to it. 

My cousin just told me how science classes work in India. I was complaining about labs in the US and how they take 4 hours and never have I understood why teachers can't just have us answer questions on a written report of what the experiment and findings are instead of having us actually do it. But my cousin told me that teachers here do exactly that and the class ends up confused and doesn't understand what's going on. 

The sir in the lab went for his coffee break so I went to go visit my friends in physiotherapy. The breakfast club had their bandages completely removed for the first time in three weeks and had a nice soak in soapy water to clean their hands up. I wanted to take a nice picture but they kept pulling the same prank on each other: hand hovering above the head of the person in front of you. Who knows. 

Jayapal uncle wanted a nice photo of just himself. I think word has gotten around that I'm sending photos to Damien once I go back to the US and now everyone wants a personal shot haha. I asked him the other day if he prayed since he is Christian and his response was that religion for him is when he watches his daughter sleeping. So cute! 

Mahaboob Basha! Was born with an extra thumb attached to his thumb and I've been DYING to see it. I finally got a chance today. All of the black marks are where he had surgery. Now that I'm looking at this picture I'm actually wondering if he had two thumbs attached to his main thumb. I feel like I can see three nails. 

I told him to pose for a picture of him proudly waving his hand! He kept laughing but I finally got a decent one. 

Back to the lab. Had to prepare the sputum slides to check for bacilli. So stomach turning watching him smear the stringy green sputum from the containers onto the glass slides. There was a short ten minute preparation of the slides using methylene blue, h2sO4, and one other chemical. 

The leftover chemicals looked really pretty in the sink. 

This guy had MDR-TB and received treatment for two years. This is the last month of treatment, and this whole time his sputum slides have come out negative for the bacilli. But because he still has a lingering cough from weakened lungs after all this time, he wouldn't believe sir when sir told him he was cured and should be celebrating. They spoke for 20 minutes and the patient was still super skeptical. This is an example of how psychologically affected these patients are. 

I'm so mad at myself for not taking a picture but three dude friends came in and one of them was told that he had TB. His friends were staring at me and joking around etc while his friend was being told such grave news. The sir had to explain to them to all be careful not to get infected and catch it from each other, and that they couldn't do crazy things like share needles when they get tattoos etc. The sir also explained that the infected patient got TB either from HIV or because he was super underweight. Apparently chewing tobacco causes you to not be hungry, and these guys were super thin cause they just chewed all the time. My cousin just said she's noticed a lot of people who chew tobacco get TB. The three dudes also each had one ear piercing. The guys walked out of the room and I thought they had left when one returned and stepped on the scale in front of me. He asked me to read the weight and when I leaned over to see what it said I realized it was a ploy to look down my shirt! Ah.