{"id":6617,"date":"2023-08-27T08:49:43","date_gmt":"2023-08-27T12:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/?p=6617"},"modified":"2023-08-27T08:49:47","modified_gmt":"2023-08-27T12:49:47","slug":"medical-terms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dahlman.online\/index.php\/2023\/08\/27\/medical-terms\/","title":{"rendered":"Medical Terms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is another in the \u201cSunday Story\u201d series.  No politics today, just some thoughts on the \u201ccold hard facts\u201d of medical terminology.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dad<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It just made me angry.\u00a0\u00a0I knew my Dad lost some memories.\u00a0\u00a0In fact, I knew exactly when it happened.\u00a0\u00a0It was the night after his second heart bypass surgery.\u00a0\u00a0Dad was notorious for reacting badly to anesthesia and \u201cintensive\u201d medical care.\u00a0\u00a0Two nights after his first heart bypass surgery, he got up, ripped off all of the wires, and headed out of the hospital room.\u00a0\u00a0When the panicked nurses (he \u201cflat-lined\u201d on the monitors) caught him in the hallway, Dad said he had a meeting in Indianapolis, and he was going to be late.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was funny, but the night after the second heart bypass wasn\u2019t so good.  I don\u2019t 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\u2019s when the stroke hit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dad was always good at covering what he didn\u2019t 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\u2019s.  He lost most of his kids growing up, and his own rise in the broadcast industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dementia<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

That began a series of \u201clittle\u201d strokes, each taking a bit more of his past.  Even when it effected his walking (Dad had a \u201cdrop foot\u201d), it didn\u2019t change his tennis game.  He might trip on the \u201cline\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what really upset me was the term for his diagnosis:  \u201cdementia\u201d.  To me, as a well-educated layman, I knew the root of the word, \u201cdemented\u201d.  It was another word for crazy, a 19th<\/sup> 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\u2019t crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The medical folks explained, over and over, that \u201cdementia\u201d wasn\u2019t \u201cdemented\u201d.  But my sense of \u201cclear meaning\u201d really struggled with that, and still does.  We don\u2019t call people \u201ccrippled\u201d anymore, and we don\u2019t use terms like \u201cidiot\u201d as part of a medical diagnosis.  Dementia ought to take the same path to oblivion.  Come up with a better term, Damn-it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Morbidly Obese<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

And I know it\u2019s different, but last week a \u201csubstitute\u201d veterinarian looked at our dog Buddy, and called him \u201cmorbidly obese\u201d.  She didn\u2019t know his past.  Buddy is a cancer survivor, a \u201cposter-pup\u201d for a new treatment for dog lymphoma.  He should have died before 2017, but he\u2019s been all-clear of cancer for six years.  And, like many in our family (can dogs get our family hereditary disease?) Buddy\u2019s thyroid doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s his Dad).   Sure he\u2019s heavy, but come up with a better way to say it.  \u201cMorbidly obese\u201d: the plain meaning is dying from fat.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Buddy is now on a low calorie diet.  He still gets two cups of \u201cdry food\u201d a day, and even gets some \u201cwet food\u201d to mix in with it.  But it\u2019s all prescription, low calorie filler, and Buddy knows it.  It doesn\u2019t help that there are three other dogs in the house on his old diet:  Pedigree beef and bacon dry and wet.  And then there\u2019s another \u201cspecial\u201d dog, our Lab Atticus, who is allergic to almost everything.  He gets salmon and sweet potato.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s what he got this morning too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crying Wolf<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

CeCe, our smallest dog, didn\u2019t eat her breakfast this morning. That\u2019s not unusual, she\u2019s often a one-meal-a-day girl.\u00a0\u00a0But this morning I saw Buddy standing over her dish, licking his lips, looking longingly at me for permission to chow down.\u00a0\u00a0He\u2019s a well-mannered boy; he wouldn\u2019t take another dog\u2019s food without permission.\u00a0\u00a0But when I didn\u2019t say it was OK, he was very, very, disappointed.\u00a0\u00a0 He stomped off to his “safe place” – the bathtub.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the vet, and the human physicians as well, over-play their hand.  I can plug my height and weight into a \u201cchart\u201d on the internet, and come close to \u201cmorbidly obese\u201d myself.  I\u2019m a history teacher.  William Howard Taft, stuck in the bathtub of the White House; he might have been \u201cmorbidly obese\u201d.  But if I\u2019m \u201cdying from fat\u201d, 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\u2019t \u201ccrying wolf\u201d (a dog reference, like it?).   And while we’re looking for another term for overweight, let\u2019s find one for losing memory as well.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One that doesn\u2019t mean crazy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Sunday Story Series<\/h4>\n\n\n\n