Journal 10-4-2010

Journal 10-4-2010

My main goal for today was to set up a research project with one of the departments at Karigiri. After we finished our various morning activities John and I set off to accomplish this mission. Our first stop was Dr. Samuel Solomon’s office. Dr. Sam is always extremely helpful and will set up meetings with people in any department if we mention anything about it. At one point, he was talking on two phones at once while his cell phone was ringing. Dr. Solomon suggested that we visit Dr. Raj Kumar in the Occupational Therapy department.

            We introduced ourselves and told Dr. Raj Kumar the type of projects that we were interested in doing. He mentioned that he might have something for John to do involving recovery time from foot ulcers. Dr. Raj Kumar also suggested that I go to the Physical Therapy department and talk to David (a physical therapist) about potential projects in that department.

            David from PT had a great project idea for me it involves sensory testing on hands and feet using monofilaments. The majority of sensory testing of this type has been done on western populations. Only a couple of studies have been published on the Indian population. The Indian population is unique for this type of testing because shoes are worn much less often. In rural populations in India footwear is worn for only a small portion of the day. I hypothesize that these differences in lifestyle and use of protective footwear contribute to higher thickness of skin on the foot. The prevalence of thick skin may contribute to a higher sensory threshold in the Indian population.

            That is the basic concept behind the study, I still need to do a lot more research on the subject. I feel good finally having topic to work on. I am supposed to report to the PT department tomorrow at 8:00 to learn how to do the monofilament tests and then start collecting data at the outpatient clinic.

            After we had our projects figured out John and I meet Leah at the Library. But they only have one computer that can surf the Internet so John and I decided to go into town to use the Internet at a shop across from VIT. We also went out for lunch at “the place with the egg rolls.” After lunch we stopped by the electronics store that one of our new friends works at. He let us try to install his MTS USB modem on my super old IBook G4. Unfortunately the old 10.4 operating system doesn’t support the MTS software. The friendly guy that works there called his buddy who is a tech guru. He told me that I couldn’t fix the problem by installing OSX Leopard (10.5) because my old ibook doesn’t pass the baseline requirement for 10.5. He did tell us that I would be able to run the MTS software by installing boot camp and Windows XP. He said he would get his hands on the appropriate software tonight and would meet us back at the shop tomorrow to install it on my laptop. Now the only remaining question is do I go with MTS or with Reliance. Reliance has a much better network and can actually support high speed broadband. But we know MTS has a faint signal at Karigiri because Leah has one.

            We eventually made it to the Internet café (closet). I downloaded some papers about Monofilament testing and did other Internet related stuff. Then we bought toilet paper, and tried to find a cash machine. We found 3 or 4 ATMs but they were all broken or out of cash. Our search did take us onto the VIT campus, which is really nice! But all the girls were laughing at John’s hair, it is startling how blatantly people stare, point and laugh in India.

            For dinner I had some peanut butter sandwiches, All-Bran flakes cereal, a bag of sour cream and onion lays (the best chips in India), and an entire box of soymilk.