Wrinkly in Eternal care
Adam Fox is a London paediatrician who has compiled a list of medical slang from doctors' notes and medical reports. His hilarious and slightly terrifying collection was excerpted in the British Medical Journal earlier this year and has now been picked up by Harper's magazine, where is appears in the current Lexicon column under the heading "Hippocratic Oafs". Here's a sample:
Ash cash: money paid for signing cremation forms
Code brown: incontinence-related emergency
Cold-tea sign: refers to the several cups of cold tea on the bedside cabinet beside a dead geriatric
Departure lounge: geriatric ward
Eternal care: intensive care
Flower sign: fresh flowers at the bedside imply patient has a supportive family
FTF: failure to fly, for attempted suicide victims
Guessing tubes: stethoscope
Handbag positive: Used to denote a patient (usually an old lady) lying in her hospital bed clutching her handbag, a sign she is confused and disoriented
House red: blood
PFO: pissed, fell over
Psychoceramics: geriatrics
Q-sign: follows the O sign, when the terminal patient's tongue hangs out of his open mouth
Sieve: a doctor who admits almost every patient he sees
TMB: too many birthdays
Treat n'street: quick patient turnaround
TUBE: totally unnecessary breast examination
Woolworth's test: used by anaesthetists. If you can imagine the patient shopping in Woolworth's then he is fit enough for an anaesthetic
Wrinkly: geriatric
Shocked? Don't be. Repairing people for a living can be rewarding but it's also is stressful, tiring and sometimes just awful. It couldn't be done without humour.
If you think that the slang Adam Fox has collected is too bizarre to be used by medical staff, consider this observation by Martha Swierczynski, who works in the Human Resources Directorate of the Department of Health in Leeds. In a British Medical Journal article called "Induction courses for international doctors", she writes:
"But even though international doctors working in the NHS have proved adequate English to practise safely, this does not mean that they are able to understand the broad accents and colloquialisms that they encounter in parts of Britain. They need introducing to the different uses of the English language and some of the slang they may hear.The language of the health service is full of abbreviations. Although most international doctors are aware of the proper English terms for diseases and procedures, they have rarely encountered the abbreviations that are commonly used in hospitals and surgeries."
