After surgery, it’s good to understand ‘Doc-speak’

I used to think I had a fair grasp of the English language. As a writer who's been doing this a long time, I know a lot of big words; when to use them and when to use their shorter counterparts. I know the difference between their, there and they're; I know that underway should be two words instead of one, unless you're talking about a departing ship. I know all kinds of good stuff.

But my recent stay in the hospital, where I bid farewell to my gall bladder, showed me there's another English language going on, a language just beneath the surface of linguistic awareness most of us assume to be the totality of the spoken word.

It’s a language spoken by doctors, nurses, orderlies and other hospital personnel. And though some of the words at first seem familiar, they have — trust me — meanings of which most of us are unaware.

The word “stool,” for instance. To the average man on the street, a stool is a place to put your feet at night, or maybe something to sit on while puttering in the garden.

Doctors and nurses think it’s something else altogether, and they LOVE to talk about it, in depth and at length; when you last had one, what it looked like, whether it manifested itself in the shape of White Jumpsuit Elvis … they can’t get enough of the stool talk.

“Presents” is another familiar word used in a strange way by hospital personnel. Presents are supposed to be a good thing, right? They bring to mind happy memories of birthdays and Christmas.

Or they used to. One visit to the emergency room and all that changes. Like “stool,” docs love to use — or misuse — the word “presents.” As in: “Your condition frequently presents as earth-shattering pain,” or “Based on the way your sonogram presents, we’ll have to remove your spleen through your nose.”

That sort of thing. It’s enough to make you hope for no more presents. Ever.

Doctors and nurses also employ a variety of clever phrases disguised as non-threatening, off-the-cuff asides. These include: “OK, you may feel a little pressure now.” This translates into: “OK, this will give you some idea of what you can expect if you ever make it to Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell.”

When removing bandages — bandages that have for the past week covered stitches with quadruple the adhesive power of Krazy Glue — nurses will ask, “So, do you want this quick or slow?” This means: “I can either yank out all your chest hairs at once, or do them one at a time over the course of 10 minutes. Either way, I’m sure to win fifteen bucks in the office pool when you cry like a baby.”

Of course, as a (hack) writer in tune with the nuances of the English language, it was only a matter of time before I came to understand the way things work.

While I was recovering from my surgery, the nurses gave me a wonderful, wonderful, grrooooovy drug called Dilaudid. It’s really good. Seriously, I’ve never been attracted to drugs before, but if I could buy this stuff at Walmart, I doubt I’d ever do anything else ever again.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that when a nurse asks me to rate my pain on a scale of one-to-ten, the correct answer, the answer that earns me my next “fix,” is: Eleven.

In truth, the pain was generally closer to a five. But “five” got me a Tylenol; “eleven” merited a dose of the good stuff.

In fact, after a hit of the Dilaudid, I felt comfortable taking part in the ongoing stool conversation.

I guess it’s all in how you say it.

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com

(616) 548-8273

Interpreting recent crop circles with Spaceman Mike

Crop circles are back in the news. This time, the mysterious patterns have been hacked into a wheat field in eastern Washington, presumably by space aliens.

Of course, the circles might also be the work of teenagers with a penchant for pranks and too much time on their hands, but conspiracy theorists the world over much prefer the space alien scenario. To be honest, so do I.

The most recent crop circles turned up in the field of Greg and Cindy Geib, who seem — in press interviews, at least — to be not at all upset by the damage done to their wheat crop. 

The Geibs’ field is located just 10 miles from Grand Coulee dam, the largest producer of hydropower in the U.S. Could this mean the space aliens are marking possible targets for future destruction? You know, for when they finally invade, take over the planet and herd us all into giant spaceships for nefarious purposes too horrible to discuss in polite company.

Crop circles aren’t always circular; they come in many shapes and sizes and have “appeared” in fields across the country for decades. The Geibs’ crop circle looks a lot like a four-leaf clover, leading some experts to believe the aliens perpetrating the deed were heavily influenced by last year’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities. Perhaps clover-shaped crop circles are the result of repeated attempted landings by aliens that have had one too many shots of Jameson. I know what that stuff does to my motor skills, so it’s a possibility.

The point is, no one really knows for sure. And that’s why it’s so much fun; we’re all left to our own devices when it comes to creating a possible explanation.

Some experts on crop circles (and how does one become a crop circle expert, anyway? Is there a school somewhere?) believe the markings, which are sometimes acres across, could be navigational aids for visitors from outer space.

Now, I never went to crop circle school, but it seems to me that beings that have travelled across light years to visit our little planet would at least have some space-going version of GPS. I mean, I can punch a few keys on my cell phone and get step-by-step directions to downtown Schenectady. Not that I would ever want to go there; the point is, I could, and I wouldn’t need large navigational beacons carved into some hapless farmer’s corn field to do so.

But maybe they’re not road signs for E.T. Maybe crop circles are the interstellar equivalent of “hobo signs,” the markings transients once inscribed on fences, posts or sidewalks to let other hobos know what they could expect by way of handouts in a certain town or neighborhood.

Maybe the Geibs’ crop circle, seen from space, relays a message like: “Don’t bother stopping here! These nitwits are still governed by a two-party political system. You wouldn’t believe the TV commercials during election years!”

Or perhaps they say: “This one is called Earth. Lots of fresh water, but unfortunately, the planet is infested with bipedal parasites. Request immediate extermination.”

Or maybe: “This place is just crawling with potential probe subjects! Best location for abducting ‘participants’: trailer parks in New Mexico.”

The crop circles could mean anything. Or nothing. Or they could be the work of teenagers after all. Or alien teenagers. To me, that one makes the most sense.

Out joyriding in daddy’s new spaceship with too much time on their hands. Damn kids!

It’s past time for the grocery revolution of 2012

I was sure it was going to come to blows. The young guy and the old guy, circling each other in the grocery store parking lot, performing that age-old dance of threatened predators; two wolves, sizing each other up, ready to go for the throat at the first sign of weakness.

The fight wasn’t over a woman, or money, or even politics and religion. The fight was over a shopping cart.

A few minutes earlier, the young guy had rolled his cart to his pickup truck, loaded in a couple bags, and then hopped in the truck and started it up.

“Hey,” shouted the old guy, who was parked two cars down the aisle. “You going to just leave that cart there?” He glanced pointedly at the “cart corral” less than 20 feet away.

The young guy in the truck, heavily tattooed and muscled, appeared neither intimidated nor shamed.

“No,” he said simply. “I ain’t. So what?”

The old guy, skinny as a rail, but with that hard-pan look of a veteran scrapper who’s seen more than his share of conflict and backed away from none of it, shook his head.

“So, your cart might hit someone’s car,” he said, adding an epithet unsuitable for print in a family newspaper. “That’s what.”

The young guy, clearly unhappy at being referred to by that particular word, stepped out of his truck and asked the old guy if he had a problem. He then added several unprintable words of his own to the conversation.

And the two began circling, fists clenched, eyes squinted in fairly passable Clint Eastwood impersonations, just daring each other to be the first to take a swing. The conversation quickly devolved into a series of unprintable nouns, interspersed with an occasional verb that served only to make the nouns even more unprintable.

Eventually, the young guy decided the old guy wasn’t worth violating his parole over; he climbed back in his truck and roared away in a black cloud of diesel smoke. The old guy called after him (though not too loudly) that yeah, he’d better run. Then he pushed the offending cart the 20 feet to the corral, got in his own car, and drove off, presumably to administer parking lot justice elsewhere.

I thought about the two of them all the way home, not sure which, if either, I should have been rooting for.

The old guy was right; the abandoned cart could well have scratched someone’s car. But, I reasoned, when did proper cart care become the purview of the customer? Long before they started making us scan and bag our own groceries, fore sure, but not THAT long ago.

At one time, stores hired human beings to do things like handle bottle returns, ring up groceries, bag groceries and — yes, kiddies, it’s true! — push the cartload of groceries to your car for you, load them in, and then push the empty cart back to the store. In exchange for these wondrous amenities, customers gave the store their business.

This not only made for happier customers and a more pleasant shopping experience, it created jobs for lots and lots of people, who in turn could then afford to shop at the stores that provided the nice services. It was a wonderful system that has been all but eradicated by greedy corporate types best described by some of the unprintable nouns uttered previously by the old guy and the young guy.

It’s against the law to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. But advocating the overthrow of a huge, impersonal grocery store chain remains — for the time-being, at least — legal. It is perfectly legal to leave your cart in the middle of the lot, where a job will be created by the guy who has to gather it back into the store.

It’s perfectly legal to leave your empty bags and cartons lying on the floor of the automated bottle-return room. The store will be forced to hire someone to clean it up, thus creating another job!

It’s altogether legal to line up 30 carts deep at the few checkout lanes still manned by human cashiers. It’s annoying and inconvenient to wait, sure, but it will send a clear message to the store’s nefarious owners: hire more humans!

If nothing else, this sort of concerted protest could help eliminate future parking lot brawls between old guys and young guys.

Vive le révolution! 

Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com or visit Reality Check’s online home at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.