I'm an Author!

Wonderful news this morning - my CF project (which I have been laboring over for years) is going to be published!! For those of you who don't know, I started a project in medical school where I interviewed adolescent and young adult patients with Cystic Fibrosis, focusing on what they knew about the genetic side of CF. Short genetics lesson - CF is autosomal recessive (meaning you have to inherit one mutated gene from each parent to have the disease). So we wanted to find out what CF patients knew about their chances of having a child with CF. It's a bit more complicated given that CF patients, especially males, have a really hard time having biological children, but no need to go into all those details here. Anyway, I did patient interviews and then developed an objective survery which I took to CF clinics both at Children's and at UAB to ask patients to complete it, did all the data analysis myself, and got to present my research at the CF conference in California back in October (see Why I'm Learning to Love Medical Conferences). And now my research is going to be published (as a letter-to-the-editor, not quite as good as an article, but not nearly as much work either) in one of the big time medical journals (Chest, for you medical folks). Hooray!