In less than two days my sister and I are going to be heading to India. We still have yet to pack or get anything ready for our 4 week trip which is slightly nerve wrecking but both of us have been crazy busy and I'm still trying to get all my disease summaries and patient write ups completed for my current rotation.
For those of you that kept up with all of my babbling last summer welcome back and for those of you that are reading this for the first time, I hope you decide to come back. I found out last year that keeping an updated blog about what I was doing during my trip was the easiest way to let everyone know once instead of repeating the same story over and over again through skype and gchat. Plus it kept my mom happy to know everything that I did and where I was at every single moment of the day.
I got lucky this year and got permission to go to India for both my optional rotation for my genetic counseling degree and my thesis project. For the first half of the trip I will be in Nagpur, Maharashtra at the Government Medical College & Hospital of Nagpur. I will be working with Dr. Dipty Jain and other physicians at the hospital in the pedis, obstetric and outpatient clinics to observe genetic counseling practices in the hospital. I will have the opportunity to talk to families to learn about their knowledge of a particular condition/disease that runs in their family to learn more about how their entire medical experience to receive a diagnosis. My research with Dr. Jain until this point has focused on collecting data on sickle cell patients to see if we can ultimately determine a clinical phenotype for Sickle Cell disease in India. I will still be working on this project while I'm in Nagpur but I'm also going to get the chance to observe genetic counseling in India and see exactly what hospitals in India consider genetic counseling. Dr. Jain told me that in addition to hemoglobinopathies they also have patients with other genetic conditions that I will be able to shadow and interact with. I will also be visiting another government hospital in Nagpur to work with Dr. Shrikhande on population screening for Sickle Cell in Nagpur. At both hospitals I will have the opportunity to travel to various villages and observe outreach clinics and visit with families. I think I will also be going to Raipur in the neighboring state while I am in Nagpur but we still haven't worked out the details of that trip yet.
For the second half of my trip I am going back to the Ashwini Adivasi Hospital in Gudalur, Tamil Nadu. I spent some time here last year and absolutely fell in love with the place. I had such a great experience that I am super excited to go back. Dr. Nandakumar really wants to increase education and awareness in the area so Akshaya and I have been working on some pamphlets that we are going to print in Tamil to distribute to the families in the area. We are also going to try to put together a video about personal hygiene, nutrition, negative consequences of smoking/alcohol, how to manage someone with stroke, sanitizing water, etc... to play in the waiting room of the hospital so people can become educated as they wait for their appointment. Our trip to Gudalur is mainly to help in any way that we can while we are there. This will definitely be where we will be most comfortable since we speak the language and can understand people without a translator. But another plus is the atmosphere and the people. Both the hospital staff and villagers were super friendly and amazing to interact with. I really did not want to leave during my visit last year and I am really excited that I get to go back while I am here. Since I speak Tamil I will get to directly speak with the patients and counsel them on my own which will be great. Explaining chromosomes to someone in English is a lot easier than explaining chromosomes to someone in Tamil, especially an individual that may not even have the baseline science education to know what chromosomes are but it's definitely going to be a great learning experience.
I started by rotations a week early this summer so I could spend an extra week at home with my family and see my grandmother and grandfather. It seems surreal that I have been able to go to India so frequently in the last two years. As a family we usually only went every 4-5 years and to have been able to go 4 times in the last two years has been great. I'm looking forward to getting to see family and my cousins and all of the new little ones that have been literally popping up over the last few years. It's nice to see them grow up and remember you as opposed to seeing them as a newborn baby and then suddenly they're 4 or 5 years old and have no idea who you are except you're coming from America and probably bringing presents.
I'm going to try to keep this updated on a daily basis which actually worked last summer but I don't know what my schedule is going to be like while I'm there so my sister and I are probably going to take turns posting this time around.
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