Today was supposed to be a normal ordinary Monday.
Last week, Claudia and I completed an initial mouse challenge experiment to look at the colonization patterns of two strains of Serotype 14 pneumos of high biofilm foramtion capacity belonging to the same ST type, one blood and and ear isolate. In the first 24 hours of challenge, 3 animals of out of 5 in the blood isolate group looked sick so we got pretty excited; as the mice challenged with the ear isolates showed no sickness. Somehow in 48 hours it looked as if the mice had managed to clear the infection and of course the mice/ears showed nothing. True enough by the harvest day of 72 hours we honestly did not know what to expect.
Somehow, when we did the cfu counts of the two strains, the patterns of migration of bacteria showed an entirely different story. As opposed to the serotype 3 isolates where the ears migrated to ears and blood was in blood, 5/5 blood isolates moved to lungs in mice and 5/5 ear isolates moved to the brain!
Although we were excited that at least our results were showing something we thought we see James and asked him what he thought when he comes in today.
So, today came. Claudia and I went in told him of the results and expected soemthing boring from him - like a yes to what we proposed for investigating this further with more mice when suddenly he beamed with delight and got very excited. His words were ' You need to call Adrienne - his wife/senior scientist '. And when she came in..for the first time in my life being here nearly 3 years he said - ZARINA found this!!!!
I will not say what the findings were as although I would love to, I cannot ( paper pending data apparently so tak boleh cakap lah). But SubhanAllah, I was so surprised when he said 'FANTASTIC!!' Smiled at me and said.. after so long of hitting your head against the wall you finally got something!! I couldn't believe it. In my heart all I could say was 'Syukur alhamdulillah , what I wanted I finally got. His approval that I wasn't here wasting my time '. He then preceeded excitedly to do more stuff involving more people including Adrienne, Caherine and Austen; and then chatted excitedly like I used to with him when I first came.
After we went back into the lab to discuss our RT-PCR protocol he went back in to see us and said that Adrienne would like to work on invasion and adhesion assay to help us give a clearer picture of what is happening. Not to mention that while in his room he straight away did stats on my work and said..YES ! It is significant statistically!!
So now we are doing some more stuff to help us shed more light on what we have found. But what I think I wanted to say here is:
"SubhanAllah, Walhamdulillah, Walaillahaillalah wallahuakbar"
Never in a million years did I expect that today James is going to be happy that I finally got something. He and Claudia have been the best supervisors in the world Allah swt has given me his humble servant ; but through my challenges I always felt I was letting them down for not giving the results I ought to.
Today proved I have. Somehow. Not sure I understand it yet but perhaps when I come home later I will.
Terima kasih Ya Allah. Kau telah mengurniakan hambaMu yang hina ini satu penghargaan yang besar di dalam perjalanan ku sebagai seorang pelajar. Walaupun aku banyak berdosa. Walaupun aku lalai. Walaupun aku tidak layak.
Dalam gembira, saya sedih. Sedih kerana saya yang sebenarnya sebesar hama kerana dosa dan alpa Allah beri limpah kurnianya yang sangat besar. Bukan saya mendewa makhluk ciptaanNya, tetapi James Paton, my supervisor is one of the biggest names in the world for pneumococcal pathogenesis. And for him to say I had dome something fantastic.. well all I can say is now; I am still stumped.
Syukur alhamdulillah. Thank you Allah my Lord, creator, hope and help for everything. Thank you so much.
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