Dr.’s orders: DGTD (Don’t get this disease)
If you’re a sports fan, you’ve surely been inspired at some time by an athlete achieving phenomenal success while dealing with a near-debilitating infirmity. Think of Michael Jordan dominating an NBA playoff game while suffering from the flu; Curt Schilling pitching his team to a World Series win while sutures in his injured ankle tear and bleed; Tiger Woods sinking a big-money putt while laboring to conceal a mustard stain on his usually immaculate golf shirt.
Well, with this column, I now humbly join that pantheon of heroic legends. Because I’m writing this piece even though I’m experiencing exanthematous eruptions of painful vesicles and ulcerations of my buccal mucous membrane.
I have hand-foot-and-mouth disease.
If you’ve never heard of hand-foot-and-mouth disease – and I sure as heck hadn’t, until I caught it from my six-year old – here are some things you should know:
§ It’s the world’s most hyphenated disease. In fact, medical scientists believe they may soon discover yet one more, between “mouth” and “disease.”
§ Wives whose husbands are suffering from it should NOT continually tell friends and neighbors that the husband in question said one too many dopey things and came down with “foot-in-mouth disease.”
Hand-foot-and-mouth disease is caused by the Coxsackie virus. I know, I know; “Coxsackie” sounds ridiculously made up, like a virus discovered in the laboratory of Rodney Dangerfield’s doctor, Vinny Boombatz. But I have to admit, having a disease caused by a slightly goofy-sounding virus brings a faint smile, even to lips covered in exanthematous eruptions.
In an effort to find more amusing aspects to this illness, I typed “hand-foot-and-mouth disease” and “funny” into Google. Amazingly, there were nearly 12,500 links. One of the best was the website of MediLexicon International Ltd. It’s supposedly “the world’s largest online database of pharmaceutical and medical abbreviations.” There are over 230,000 abbreviations on the website, gathered from actual patient charts and records. How MediLexicon deciphers the lousy handwriting of thousands of doctors is anyone’s guess.
Just for fun, I typed in my initials, to see what “DS” stands for in the medical world. There’s actually a pretty lengthy list, but my wife says one in particular describes me perfectly: “Density Standard.”
Anyway, MediLexicon showed up in my search because the website also features a list of “humorous acronyms and abbreviations,” again, written by actual doctors on actual hospital records. Here are few that I think are pretty funny. Unless they ever show up on my medical chart.
§ ATSWWT (Always Thinks Something's Wrong With Them)
§ CTD (Circling The Drain)
§ FDGB (Fall Down Go Boom)
§ FFFF (Female, Fat, Forty and Flatulent)
§ FLD (Funny Looking Dad)
§ FLK (Funny Looking Kid)
§ FOS (Full Of ... Stool)
§ FTW (Friggin Train Wreck; i.e., a patient with multiple problems)
§ GOMER (Get Out of My Emergency Room)
§ LOLINAD (Little Old Lady In No Acute Distress)
§ ODD & DDR (Out 'De Door and Down 'De Road; see GOMER)
§ PITA (Pain In The Arse)
§ TTGA (Told To Go Away)
§ WDWNF (Well-Developed, Well-Nourished Female)
I tried picturing a doctor who would actually use codes like these, and I kept thinking of Johnny Carson’s medicine man, Dr. Ben Dover.
Thinking of him distracted me even further from my ulcerated buccal mucous membrances, so I decided to search for other weird but true names for medical practitioners. I discovered a treasure trove of them, collected and maintained on an ongoing basis by a woman named Mari Stoddard, who works at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Library. Here are some of the best from her list (remember, these are real):
§ An allergist named Dr. Aikenhead.
§ An anesthestitist named Dr. Tranquilli.
§ A surgeon named Dr. Klutts.
§ Dentists named Pulley, Fang, DeKay, and Toothaker.
§ An ER physician named Dr. Gore.
§ A gastroenterologist named Dr. Butt.
§ A neurologist named Dr. Brain.
§ A general practitioner named Dr. Kwak.
There are tons more, and I look forward to sharing them with the only doctor who hasn’t prescribed TTGA for my HFMD: my urologist, Dr. Sackcoxie.
# # #
TakefiveT5@yahoo.com
Well, with this column, I now humbly join that pantheon of heroic legends. Because I’m writing this piece even though I’m experiencing exanthematous eruptions of painful vesicles and ulcerations of my buccal mucous membrane.
I have hand-foot-and-mouth disease.
If you’ve never heard of hand-foot-and-mouth disease – and I sure as heck hadn’t, until I caught it from my six-year old – here are some things you should know:
§ It’s the world’s most hyphenated disease. In fact, medical scientists believe they may soon discover yet one more, between “mouth” and “disease.”
§ Wives whose husbands are suffering from it should NOT continually tell friends and neighbors that the husband in question said one too many dopey things and came down with “foot-in-mouth disease.”
Hand-foot-and-mouth disease is caused by the Coxsackie virus. I know, I know; “Coxsackie” sounds ridiculously made up, like a virus discovered in the laboratory of Rodney Dangerfield’s doctor, Vinny Boombatz. But I have to admit, having a disease caused by a slightly goofy-sounding virus brings a faint smile, even to lips covered in exanthematous eruptions.
In an effort to find more amusing aspects to this illness, I typed “hand-foot-and-mouth disease” and “funny” into Google. Amazingly, there were nearly 12,500 links. One of the best was the website of MediLexicon International Ltd. It’s supposedly “the world’s largest online database of pharmaceutical and medical abbreviations.” There are over 230,000 abbreviations on the website, gathered from actual patient charts and records. How MediLexicon deciphers the lousy handwriting of thousands of doctors is anyone’s guess.
Just for fun, I typed in my initials, to see what “DS” stands for in the medical world. There’s actually a pretty lengthy list, but my wife says one in particular describes me perfectly: “Density Standard.”
Anyway, MediLexicon showed up in my search because the website also features a list of “humorous acronyms and abbreviations,” again, written by actual doctors on actual hospital records. Here are few that I think are pretty funny. Unless they ever show up on my medical chart.
§ ATSWWT (Always Thinks Something's Wrong With Them)
§ CTD (Circling The Drain)
§ FDGB (Fall Down Go Boom)
§ FFFF (Female, Fat, Forty and Flatulent)
§ FLD (Funny Looking Dad)
§ FLK (Funny Looking Kid)
§ FOS (Full Of ... Stool)
§ FTW (Friggin Train Wreck; i.e., a patient with multiple problems)
§ GOMER (Get Out of My Emergency Room)
§ LOLINAD (Little Old Lady In No Acute Distress)
§ ODD & DDR (Out 'De Door and Down 'De Road; see GOMER)
§ PITA (Pain In The Arse)
§ TTGA (Told To Go Away)
§ WDWNF (Well-Developed, Well-Nourished Female)
I tried picturing a doctor who would actually use codes like these, and I kept thinking of Johnny Carson’s medicine man, Dr. Ben Dover.
Thinking of him distracted me even further from my ulcerated buccal mucous membrances, so I decided to search for other weird but true names for medical practitioners. I discovered a treasure trove of them, collected and maintained on an ongoing basis by a woman named Mari Stoddard, who works at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Library. Here are some of the best from her list (remember, these are real):
§ An allergist named Dr. Aikenhead.
§ An anesthestitist named Dr. Tranquilli.
§ A surgeon named Dr. Klutts.
§ Dentists named Pulley, Fang, DeKay, and Toothaker.
§ An ER physician named Dr. Gore.
§ A gastroenterologist named Dr. Butt.
§ A neurologist named Dr. Brain.
§ A general practitioner named Dr. Kwak.
There are tons more, and I look forward to sharing them with the only doctor who hasn’t prescribed TTGA for my HFMD: my urologist, Dr. Sackcoxie.
# # #
TakefiveT5@yahoo.com
posted by Don Stuart at 12:10 PM
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