Journal 10-12-2010

Journal 10-12-2010

Today I got up fairly early and made it to David’s office in the Physiotherapy department at 8:00. I talked with him briefly about who I could easily sample and about getting access to some patient charts. He told me to go down and pay a visit to the students at the prosthetics shop. They were very friendly and it was fun to poke at their feet.

I spent a lot of time at the rickshaw stand sitting on a bench and trying to get the drivers to let me test them but through some combination of misunderstanding my English and lack of interest nobody would let me poke their feet. I will keep at it, as soon as one of them does it, the testing becomes like a game and it is really easy to get a group of people. It also didn’t help that Gopi our favorite rickshaw driver wasn’t there at the time. I think he could have helped me out.

I spent the second half of the day in a small room looking through patient charts and copying down information from ones that I could use in my study. This process was very time consuming and I only found 7 useable patients so far. However I know that many more exist. It is just a matter of getting the woman who works with the physiotherapy records to help me find them. It is a little bit crazy that I have access to any patient history that I want to see.

For dinner John, Leah and I took a rickshaw into VIT and ate at a non-veg northern Indian food place. It was really good, Leah’s prawns were the best dish that we ordered but they were too spicy for her and she spent the whole dinner trying to cool her mouth down. I want to go back and try the chicken tika masala. We made it back to Karigiri around bedtime. I had a really hard time sleeping because the whistle blowers kept biking around in a circle around the Karigiri campus blowing whistles to each other. I think they are some sort of security guards. Leah has seen them sleeping under trees for hours at a time. But I guess they are probably tired from staying up all night biking around blowing their stupid whistles.

At about 4 am a puppy managed to crawl onto the walkway in front of our room and sat there whining for at least an hour until john got up and went outside. The first time I think he just yelled at it. It stayed quiet for about 10 minutes then john got up again. I encouraged him to throw some water on it. He did this and the puppy stayed quiet for about 45 minutes. Then they VERY loud whining continued and John got up, left the room in his boxers, picked up the puppy by the scruff of its neck and carried it across the road and set it in some tall grass. I finally slipped into undisturbed sleep at about 6 and did not wake up until my parents started to call around 7:00. Normally I would have answered but I was in no mood to talk and I answering would mean that I would keep John up as well. So I rejected the call on my phone, which was by my bed. But they also tried my old phone several, which is now johns phone and he got up to check it. Anyway, it was a bad night for sleeping. (Sorry for not answering your call Mom and Dad).