Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Nurse humor

The other day I was listening to some nurses talk about patients having to go back to surgery because of excessive bleeding. "Yeah, sometimes they have a prolene deficiency, hypoprolenemia," said one to gales of laughter. I didn't so much get it. Later I discreetly asked my preceptor what I was missing. Prolene is a kind of suture material the cardiovascular surgeons use. Now that is funny.

Heh. Uh, so -emia means "concerning the blood" and hypo means "below normal" so the comical neologism hypoprolenemia means "the surgeon didn't put in enough stitches." See? Hilarious. Less so cause I had to explain the whole thing, but still funny. Well, maybe not to the surgeons.

4 comments:

  1. I totally would have gotten the joke had you spelled hypoprolenemia correctly the first time it appears in this post.

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  2. And then there's the gails/gales issue...

    THANK YOU FOR UPDATING. I LOOK FORWARD TO READING UP WHEN I HAVE MORE TIME. :)

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  3. No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have pointed it out. I hate so much when people point out typos in my entries. I just happened to be taking a break from editing when I clicked in to your blog, so it leapt right out at me.

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