How to Talk Hospital

The Essential Hospital Handbook, by Patrick Conlon (Yale University Press, $18), covers every aspect of a visit: from the ER and surgery to intensive care and recovery.

Along with a helpful list of serious medical terms, Conlon also reveals the slang terms that doctors and nurses use behind your back (and one another’s backs). Here are just a few examples:

Axe, blade, slasher - A surgeon

Baby catcher - An obstetrician

Banana - A patient with jaundice

Bunny boiler - A dangerously obsessive or unbalanced woman. From the film Fatal Attraction.

Captain Kangaroo - Chief pediatrician

Coffin dodger - Someone who survived against expectations

Foreverectomy - A surgical procedure that lasts a very long time

House red - Blood

OBE - Open at Both Ends (diarrhea and vomiting)

Rear admiral - A proctologist

Shadow gazer - A radiologist

Spark ’em - To defibrillate a patient

Stream team - The urology department

From Reader's Digest - August 2009

 

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