Files Files and More Files

Sawubona, Unjani! (Zulu ‘introduction’ for hello, hope you are well) Today was VERY uninteresting. All we did the whole day was sort through files and gather information for our theses. We created an outline and starting keeping data in an excel chart, which is taking forever to put together. It’s also taking forever to search through each person’s file to determine if their case is relevant to our theses, and if so, find the information we need. We are focusing all of our attention on HIV patients currently on treatment. It’s quite interesting to see how pre-existing conditions are affecting the progression or digression of the disease treatment, and what co morbid infections are being developed, if any. It is also pretty interesting to see how each person is responding to treatment, and what happens when resistance starts, or when adherence and compliance to the patient’s regime falter. This is all we did the entire day. Dr. Khan didn’t have anything interesting going on with his patients, so we didn’t get to mix our day up with a little excitement. It was just pure paperwork. And for some reason, the first half of the morning I became so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, which made the work even more torturous. Tomorrow we are going to collect a bit more date in the morning, and then start actually writing our papers in the afternoon. Hopefully by the end of the week we can have made some solid progress towards finishing our theses. We are hoping it works out this way! My family was having shelves built on the walls in place of their wardrobes that sit against the walls today, so it was really loud. You could barely hear anything over the drills and wood being cut. It was pretty annoying, but luckily they have left for the day, and we are left in peace for the rest of the evening. This whole week is going to be quite slow, so I won’t have much to say. Maybe Dr. Khan will throw something exciting at us to keep us looking up throughout the week.