Friday, September 09, 2005

Can we have some of ur blood please?

No I'm not turning into a vampire. We went for our field work on Tues n Thur to collect blood (and saliva) samples for our study. It was pretty exciting. The rest of the group kept asking me how I found the trip to the factory (sounded as if they were eager to find out the response from a 9 yr old kid going to the zoo for the first time). Everything went smoothly, except that I missed out a few consent forms (oops!). The workers were pretty friendly, and most had no problem donating that little extra bit of blood. The workers from China were more reluctant...was quite amazed that there were so many of them there...but after some persuasion they agreed. There were quite a number Indian workers from Malaysia too..and interestingly they kept insisting I had to speak to them in Malay for the questionnaire altho they had no problems speaking English when Vivian interviewed them. Yesterday's session was smoother than Tuesday's. The consent forms n questionnaires tallied (woohoo). One pakcik however was so unwilling to donate his blood. He was like, "Why do u ppl keep asking me for blood..didn't u do that last year? And how do I know that it's gonna be kept confidential? etc etc" I tried to calm him down by saying that's why he's signing the consent form etc and of course things will be confidential but he started erupting by saying even the S'pore govt is all out to cheat us. Lol. Like what's the connection? Even after he went to Viv's station he came back to me to complain (unfortunately I was the only one who could understand Malay). Well eventually we told him he can always just go ahead with his medical examination. Later on I found out that he was complaining at every station he went to haha. There was another Jap guy, a phd chemist...who asked a million and one questions and after half an hour of probing (the rest just took half a minute) decided not to donate his saliva or blood. Waste time onli :P Anyway this occupational med stuff is turning out to be pretty fun (I did think it was fun to begin with...)

When we returned to lab with the samples, YB taught me how to separate the blood components n stuff. It was simple but tedious cos we had ard 30 samples x 3 separations to do. The grossest part was when YB n I had to discard the urine samples cos the bottles we collected them in were not autoclavable. Imagine 30 ppl peeing into the same bowl. It STANK!! Will have to start on the assays next week. And I have to tabulate the questionnaire results too. Gosh sounds like a lot of work heh. Hope I can finish them soon so that I'm not bogged down when my GAME modules start. Cos altho I'm not an official student, Prof Chia said I should sit in and even do class assignments and CAs so that I can get credits for the modules later on. Looking forward to meeting the new Swedish students too.

Ok enough boring stuff abt work n studies. Shall end here for now. Gonna meet CY for lunch today. Tata. :)

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