My project

So, at this point, you might be wondering: "What does Cully do with his time in South Africa besides surf, chase elephants, and update his blog?"

And you would be write to do so, since that is all you hear about. I intentionally leave a lot of what goes on at work out of my weblog as its often pretty boring to just about every one but me, and I even get pretty bored with it at times. But I cant have everyone thinking I just lay around and sun myself all day (although, thats all I really did yesterday), so here is a description of what I am working on.

I would say that my main role is that of a "Study Clinician." I essentially work as a primary care doctor for patients with HIV that are on a regimen of antiretroviral drugs. I do this at a rural clinic once a week, and at the Durban clinic 2-3 times a week. I see patients at various stages of treatment. Some are very ill and have very low CD4 counts. Others were sick previously, and are now doing much better. Still others no longer have symptoms related to HIV or AIDS, but suffer from the many side effects of the powerful drugs they are taking. Regardless, its easy to see what good these drugs can do in a patient. They gain their lost weight back, their skin is no longer chronically infected, they dont suffer from oral fungal infections, and generally they just feel better. This is really rewarding to see, and I feel priveliged to be a part of it all.

The not so exciting part of my work is the research. I am currently collecting data on all the patients who have CD4 counts below 50. Normal is around a thousand and they say you are diagnosed with AIDS at 200. So these patients are particularly ill. We have all their old charts, but have to transcribe them into a database that automatically checks for errors and contradictoins. This is the really boring part. We take physicians notes, and fill out lots and lots of paperwork. Its not a lot of fun. But in the end, all our data will be in this great database that can be manipulated by statisticians and drawn up into charts, graphs, regressions, etc. The end product will be a paper that describes a cohort of 100 patients with very low CD4 counts, 50 of whom are on antiretroviral treatment, 50 of which are not.

I am also hoping to use this data and this paper for an honor's thesis at UTMB. Its a lot of work to put together, but I am basically doing the work already, so I might as well try and get some credit it for it all.

Well, that is about it. I will likely not report on this stuff too much. I will certainly mention patients and interesting people that come up, but I dont think too many people are dying to hear how the data transcription is coming along. So if you want to know more, just ask.