Archive → May, 2008
Medical Slang II
Apologies, this week has been too fucked up to write about, so here is part 2 of this post. I tried to use the first one (hat trick) a number of times but no one seems to get it……..
Hat Trick:Patient with three tubes in him, one in his pee pee (for urine) one in his nose (to drain fluid from his stomach) and one in his vein. Usually as part of trauma management; rarely done with any effeciency in this country.
Hi Fives: HIV Positive Patients
NARS: Not Another Rocket Scientist (usually a dumb newb)
OFIG: One foot in the Grave
P4P: Penicillin 4 a Prick (antibiotics for an STD)
PEP : Pharmaceutically Enhanced Personality: High or Stoned
PITA: Pain in the ass
RBG: Recieved by God
Roach, Road Pizza, Road Chilli, Toasted Goomer: A patient who barely survives after a massive usually crushing trauma.
Silver Goose/Silver Stallion: procotscope/ass camera.
TARFU: Things are Really fucked Up.
Secret Handshake: Rectal Exam
SBI: Something Bad inside = CANCER !!!!!
HBC: hit by Car
Teriyaki special: A really bad infection of the skin. Usually producing a texture similar to teriyaki beef/chicken (necrotising faciatis)
Blamestorming: Trying to find a scapegoat for the unit/teams fuck-up.
Pumpikin Positive: A dumb patient (with a hollow head)
Disco biscuits: Idiots who have taken ecstasy without drinking water and have ended up coming in because of dehydration.
TTFO: Told to fuck off (imsarif il mareeth) – an art form in and of itself… believe me.
Jack Bauer: A doctor who has been up and running for 24 hours.
Kaiser Soze: A disappearing Colleague = slacker.
P.S. A shout out to demon who has been missed over the last number of posts.
Schools Out for Summer ……….
Well not quite yet …….
It’s finally exam season, parents looking forward to trips to London, France, Spain and the U.S. and kids faking headaches, stomach aches and ending up with appendectomies they don’t need (hey look on the bright side kids; you’ll get two weeks sick leave as well as nice little scar on the right side of you belly).
So with scoring coffee being such a hassle these days and cocaine being so hard to get here in Kuwait, our future doctors, lawyers, CEOs, rocket scientists (and let’s face it, terrorists) are going to have to look for other drugs to get them through the night. And while I could go on and on about how people should study all year ’round I’m one of those people who disagrees with that idea.I think that you should spend time on subjects that interest you (for me it was OBGYN; but whatever floats yer boat) and I see nothing wrong with trying to cram the rest 12 hours before the exam. (We’ve all done it ye hypocrites….)
The drug that seems to be on everyones lips is Ritalin (some amphetamine). I doubt that half the people (even those on Desperate Housewives) who have touted/talked/bragged about Ritalin have actually used it. Retalin upregulates certain pathways in the brain. It makes certain thought processes more intense, increases concentration and induces systemic responses such as tachycardia but does not increase your IQ or your capacity to function mentally (i.e. it increases your acceleration not the speed) so it makes more sense to use it as a party drug at the shaleh rather than a study aid 2 minutes before your exam, and lets not forget the 36 side effects, adverse effects and reactions (yes I do know them all by heart) Show ▼
But not to worry kids; recent advances have allowed scientists to design a drug that allows you to upregulate most of your neural activity with a significant increase in concentration (in other words they designed anabolic steroids for the brain) and (to a limited extent) IQ. The drug is known as Provigil (Modafinil) and is available in tablet form; it was originally developed to help people with narcolepsy stay awake, was then marketed as an anti-jetlag drug and once they found out it was just as good as cocaine they decided to try it out on dumb people and found out it makes the dumb ones smarter without making the smart ones dumber. The only problem is that no one is quite sure how it works ………
Oh well have a good summer regardless of whether you pass or fail
(and no I don’t know where you can get it in Kuwait)
Killing me with your Suicide
One of the inevitable admissions during any given call will be a suicide; most people have a good reason for it (or at least they think they do) but they end up fucking it up in one way or another and manage to make it to hospital.
The problem is that because they very rarely get it right they end up waking people (namely me) up at four in the morning after spending the whole day dealing with road traffic accidents, 16 year olds with headaches and 35 year olds wanting 3 day weekends
The main mistakes people make when attempting suicide are related to a lack of understanding of the medical concepts underlying their chosen method.
For example I don’t think that people know that when they slash their wrists the should be aiming for arteries that are pretty darn deep (they are in fact closer to the bone than the skin) and they usually end up cutting into a vien and tearing through a couple of nerves causing paralysis and numbness across their hands which is probably going to be there for the rest of their lives and won’t have any effect on their life expectancy in the short term.
Another thing is that people don’t seem to know that panadol will kill you in a very slow and painful manner. If you take a panadol/paracetamol overdose you WILL get acute liver failure which is largely permanent. This results in a slow often painful death (which is not exactly what the person committing suicide was intending) as your body gets more and more jaundiced and the signs of liver failure begin to manifest.
People even manage to get hanging wrong; there are two ways people can die from a hanging (self inflicted or otherwise):
- either by smacking the first two vertebrae in your neck against each other resulting in a hangmans fracture (which is when part of your second vertebra breaks off and embeds in your spine causing paraplegia and instant death)
- or (as in most cases) they end up inducing a far slower and more painful death through asphyxia (cutting off the blood supply to the brain) which may take 40 minutes to an hour. (yes, I know everybody says the brain only survives for 3-5 minutes without oxygen but what they mean is that permanent brain damage starts after 3-5 minutes).
So the next time somebody thinks of committing suicide please bear in mind the following:
- You probably won’t get it right and will have to live with the permanent damage you have inflicted on your self.
- The doctor who is coming so treat you will have a splitting headache, be tired, bitter and will have very little sympathy.
- It will take 24 hours to get a psychiatrist to see you (this is the Ministry of Health afterall)
- Suicide is never the answer. Please consult a psychiatrist (preferably a good one) as soon as you can. Believe it does help and tends to put things into perspective and will hopefully stop you from making a mistake that everyone will regret.
P.S. kudos to the l33t h4x0r who tried to get my password hash last week
Superhero Medicine
I went to see the Ironman movie the other day (which was awesome BTW) and it got me thinking about how/if superpowers could be explained medically. Both Batman and Iron man were easy; they (literally) paid their dues, but some of the others are just as feasible (well in theory at least)
Lets start off the the hulk; I’m going to avoid the whole transformation part which I’m just not smart/educated enough to find an explanation for and will concentrate on the super human strength and why he turns green when angry:
- The superhuman strength is easy, he just has an over-active hormonal axis which leads to high levels of adrenaline, testosterone and growth hormone which gives him an increase in muscle mass (at the expense of his fertility which explains why there is no Hulk junior.)
- The green skin color comes from the effects of gamma rays on his skin cells which produce biochromes rather than melanin and have become chromatophores (cells which can change color) allowing him to change his color where he feels angry/threatened, similar to various aquatic animals.
Next up we have the man without fear; Daredevil. His ability to see sound is similar to that of a dolphin:
- Dolphins can tell how far an object is by the amount of time it takes for sound waves to reflect back off it.
- They can detect it’s speed by alterations in the pitch of the emitted sound wave (via the Doppler effect)
- And the nature/consistency of an object by how it distorts a given sound wave.
The areas of the brain used by dolphins to interpret sound waves are infact found in the human brain; but are largely under developed (probably due to lack of use); In Matthew Murdocks case (largely thanks to a hefty dose of radioactive boo ha ha as child) they’ve been made active and not only give him the ability to see sound but also to detect lies by hearing a persons heart beat.
Lastly, there’s spidermans wall climbing antics and they’re the easiest to explain. Spiders stick to walls using globs of silk secreted by special glands, there’s no reason why the radioactive spider can’t modify a persons DNA at just the right point and allow his sweat glands to do the exact same thing. Hey, if it can happen to a goat there’s no reason why it can’t be done on humans, any volunteers?
P.S. Apologies to all the Hulk fans out there, I was just kidding. Besides there’s no way I could sully Bruce Banners name worse than Ang Lee did last year.
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