After a fairly uneventful night duty I got about working on my thesis – the main reason for joining the Neonatology unit. But unfortunately I’d ended up making a terrible error. I thought the last date for submission would be around July 2006. But I casually checked in the office today and I was informed that the last date was just 15th March and I could extend it by 15 days only. The situation was grim and I felt like kicking myself. After some discussion with Dr. Jana and Dr. Anil, an alternative strategy was worked out which left me with a decent shot at finishing on time. I was exempted from regular ward rounds and responsibilities as there were lots of registrars this month! Now I started pulling out some results of babies born in 2004 on the computer. It was a pretty big task – check the cord pH of 8000 babies born in 2004. Fortunately the number ids are in blocks of sequences and after doodling with the keyboard, I finally got down to a systematic sequence of keystrokes that would help me scan faster. Input number – [enter] – [tab] – [tab] – scroll – visually check if the cord pH was less than 7.00 – [backspace] – [backspace] – [left arrow] – [backspace] – change last digit…. and there we are…. my fingers flying over the keyboard till I found a pH less than 7.00 when I had to pause to enter some stuff on paper. There’s a pic of the screen that shows the results! It’s going faster than expected and I expect to finish by friday.
I’m very wary of what’s going to follow. It seems quite difficultto be able to finish the thesis. I’ve been quite careless I guess. I’ll just lay it in God’s hands and work hard on it!