Medical Terms

This is another in the “Sunday Story” series.  No politics today, just some thoughts on the “cold hard facts” of medical terminology.

Dad

It just made me angry.  I knew my Dad lost some memories.  In fact, I knew exactly when it happened.  It was the night after his second heart bypass surgery.  Dad was notorious for reacting badly to anesthesia and “intensive” medical care.  Two nights after his first heart bypass surgery, he got up, ripped off all of the wires, and headed out of the hospital room.  When the panicked nurses (he “flat-lined” on the monitors) caught him in the hallway, Dad said he had a meeting in Indianapolis, and he was going to be late. 

That was funny, but the night after the second heart bypass wasn’t so good.  I don’t know if he was headed back to Indianapolis, but Dad decided to get out of bed.  There were all the cardiac wires, and the intravenous tubes, and worse of all, the catheter tube.  Dad got up, tripped, and fell to the floor, where they found him a few minutes later.  We think that’s when the stroke hit.

Dad was always good at covering what he didn’t remember, almost to the end of his near ninety-eight years.  But that night in the hospital, he lost a lot of memories, really from the middle of World War II until the middle 1970’s.  He lost most of his kids growing up, and his own rise in the broadcast industry.

Dementia

That began a series of “little” strokes, each taking a bit more of his past.  Even when it effected his walking (Dad had a “drop foot”), it didn’t change his tennis game.  He might trip on the “line” walking onto the court, but he would still charge the net with the best, and even go back for an overhead.  His autonomic nervous system for tennis was different than the one that took care of walking.

But what really upset me was the term for his diagnosis:  “dementia”.  To me, as a well-educated layman, I knew the root of the word, “demented”.  It was another word for crazy, a 19th century term for people who were locked in the attic or put into insane asylums.  My Dad was suffering from the after-effects of strokes, he wasn’t crazy.

The medical folks explained, over and over, that “dementia” wasn’t “demented”.  But my sense of “clear meaning” really struggled with that, and still does.  We don’t call people “crippled” anymore, and we don’t use terms like “idiot” as part of a medical diagnosis.  Dementia ought to take the same path to oblivion.  Come up with a better term, Damn-it.

Morbidly Obese

And I know it’s different, but last week a “substitute” veterinarian looked at our dog Buddy, and called him “morbidly obese”.  She didn’t know his past.  Buddy is a cancer survivor, a “poster-pup” for a new treatment for dog lymphoma.  He should have died before 2017, but he’s been all-clear of cancer for six years.  And, like many in our family (can dogs get our family hereditary disease?) Buddy’s thyroid doesn’t function well.  He takes thyroid pills every day.  Add those factors, and slowing down with old age, and Buddy is probably fifteen pounds overweight (so’s his Dad).   Sure he’s heavy, but come up with a better way to say it.  “Morbidly obese”: the plain meaning is dying from fat.  

So Buddy is now on a low calorie diet.  He still gets two cups of “dry food” a day, and even gets some “wet food” to mix in with it.  But it’s all prescription, low calorie filler, and Buddy knows it.  It doesn’t help that there are three other dogs in the house on his old diet:  Pedigree beef and bacon dry and wet.  And then there’s another “special” dog, our Lab Atticus, who is allergic to almost everything.  He gets salmon and sweet potato.

Buddy dutifully ate his new mix for the first couple of days.  But yesterday, he took one look at it, then looked at me, then walked away.  After a lot of discussion (with Buddy) we finally mixed a little of the wet beef and bacon in.  He ate.  That’s what he got this morning too.

Crying Wolf

CeCe, our smallest dog, didn’t eat her breakfast this morning. That’s not unusual, she’s often a one-meal-a-day girl.  But this morning I saw Buddy standing over her dish, licking his lips, looking longingly at me for permission to chow down.  He’s a well-mannered boy; he wouldn’t take another dog’s food without permission.  But when I didn’t say it was OK, he was very, very, disappointed.   He stomped off to his “safe place” – the bathtub.

I think the vet, and the human physicians as well, over-play their hand.  I can plug my height and weight into a “chart” on the internet, and come close to “morbidly obese” myself.  I’m a history teacher.  William Howard Taft, stuck in the bathtub of the White House; he might have been “morbidly obese”.  But if I’m “dying from fat”, then there are a whole lot of people going ahead of me.  So maybe we ought to come up with a different term for that, one that isn’t “crying wolf” (a dog reference, like it?).   And while we’re looking for another term for overweight, let’s find one for losing memory as well.  

One that doesn’t mean crazy.

The Sunday Story Series

Author: Marty Dahlman

I'm Marty Dahlman. After forty years of teaching and coaching track and cross country, I've finally retired!!! I've also spent a lot of time in politics, working campaigns from local school elections to Presidential campaigns.