Words on the Wards

At first, this worried me—a firehose didn’t sound particularly pleasant, as water sources go—but after a while, I heard it so often that the deluge of information that did indeed come with the first semester of medical school wasn’t much of a surprise. “The patient presents with past medical history significant for…”, “We need to have a high index of suspicion”, “This is the gold standard of treatment.” Individual words form the building blocks of this language, and since I loved words even before coming to medical school, it has been fascinating to take in all these new ones. Or “Let's take a listen or look”, rather than the more formal “I am going to…” or “I have to…” or “Can you sit on the table, move your drape, stick out your tongue for me”, which is, to me, one of the most interesting ones, because whatever the patient is doing is not really for you, but those few syllables call attention to the fact that this is a shared experience.