From Patient to Researcher

I know what it’s like to be lying in a hospital bed with a terrible bacterial infection contracted in India, waiting anxiously for a medical professional to figure out why this escalated so badly. Waiting to be diagnosed, waiting to be given medication, waiting to be fixed. Now I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that wait. What it’s like to work in a lab dedicated to public health research aimed at fast traveling global diseases, especially those increasingly resistant to the broad-spectrum antibiotics many patients like me are placed on. 

If you read my post from February, you know that last January, I came back from a trip to India with Salmonella typhi, which escalated to sepsis. My doctors placed me on a variety of broader Salmonella-specific antibiotics because they couldn’t identify the subspecies. It was only the day I was discharged that the New York Department of Health used gene sequencing to figure out the exact infection, much later than when it would have been most helpful to my doctors. Ever since that experience, I questioned why identifying and treating internationally acquired bacterial infections felt so slow, and wondered how this gap could be bridged.  

If you’re an avid reader of my blog (thanks!), you also know that I did investigate this research question through the creation of a proof-of-concept machine learning model for disease risk assessment using synthetic India and United States travel records. I learned a lot about the use of Machine Learning in public health and was able to share my knowledge in the National High School Journal of Science. As much as I enjoyed that experience, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to be on the frontlines of this research. It was because of this that, after a lot of emails, I ended up interning at the Gray Lab at the Wadsworth Center at the New York Department of Health (the same institute that ultimately sequenced my bacterial infection’s DNA). 

This lab studies Mycobacterium tuberculosis. TB is largely considered solved. It is certainly not thought of as a western disease; however, it has proven to be increasingly drug resistant and continues to affect many lower-income populations in the United States, as well as millions in the developing world. For the past six weeks, I have been working with a close relative of Tuberculosis to identify genes playing a role in erratic DNA transfer—the same genes helping TB evade attacks from our very own immune cells. I was excited to be studying a disease that knows no borders, similar to the Salmonella infection I suffered from.

In addition to being given the chance to improve my research abilities and work directly with bacterial cultures and genetic tools, working at Wadsworth felt very personal, and even emotional at times. Almost two years ago, I was just a patient with a set of symptoms and cultures waiting to be diagnosed from scientists far away, in an institute I had no connection to. Now that I’ve spent more than a month doing mycobacteriology work on the same scientific terrain that explained what had happened to me, I feel confident enough to say that I am finally on the side of the bench that asks the questions instead of the side of the bed that just has to wait for answers. 

Of course, in my next few blog posts, I’ll make sure to explain the research I did, whether that be working with CRISPR or learning about the nature of Mycobacterium smegmatis. However, this is all part of a bigger picture and sort of a full-circle moment. It's about what it meant for me to turn the worst month of my life into a reason to understand something better. I’ve graduated from patient to researcher, and I feel a lot closer to being someone who can help work to answer the questions that hundreds of patients lying in ICU beds with internationally-acquired bacterial infections are wondering, waiting for someone to tell them what’s wrong.