Apologies to any colleagues who read my editorial on Friday in the weekly departmental newsletter. Feel free to move on to the next post which will hopefully be something original and witty.
My daughter who is “studying” down in Otago posted in our group chat this week about an acronym she came across in economics (so clearly there must be at least some basic minimum of lectures being attended) known as TANSTAAFL (and when I misspelled it just now it got autocorrected so clearly it’s a real thing). It stands for There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. So I responded with an article about medical acronyms. You know the sort of thing: GOMER, NFN (normal for Norwich),SNEFS(subnormal even for Suffolk), FLK with FLP, ART (assuming room temperature, for someone recently expired). There was one I hadn’t heard of:TTFO. Not, as you might expect, a misspelling of Tiggers adorable TTFN, but rather something very close to the phrase Told To go away. The doctor who wrote that in his notes about a particular case had the presence of mind, when quizzed by a judge in court, to say that it stood for To Take Fluids Orally. The one that most tickled my daughter’s fancy, however, was a condition that she has suffered from intermittently since moving down South: UBI or Unexplained Beer Injury.
Had to drag myself out of my sick bed to present an interesting case at the M and M meeting of a private hospital (AKA The Golden Nugget, or “the institute of higher earning”) yesterday evening. I rode there on my old bicycle in the hopes that someone might steal it during the meeting, but when I came out it was still there. To add insult to injury, I then had to bike home in a deluge of horizontal sleet. Am anticipating a relapse of my cold any moment. In addition, I expect I’ll be having to write a reply to another “please explain” letter soon. My patient on Wednesday was so attached to his flexi LMA that he resisted all my efforts to get it out of his mouth at the end of the case, and then when I finally got it out with his help, he refused to let go of it, so we arrived in PACU with him semi conscious but still gripping the offending article firmly in his hand, so that it looked like a droopy bunch of flowers that he was proudly displaying to all interested parties in the room as well as en route. Of course it only took a firm word from the PACU nurse to get him to give up his prize so I ended up looking even more ineffectual than I normally do.
Can I ask all my reader/s to please consider signing the petition that will be circulating the department, to ask management for your newsletter editorial team to get their own office? The response has been terrific so far but we can always get more. So far we have two signatures.
The biggest news this week was the Let’s Get Wellington Moving announcement yesterday. Very exciting and a really promising step in the right direction. We are definitely overdue some protected bike lanes, to keep nice, law abiding motorists away from deranged and obsessive cyclists. And to the person in the gratuitously large black SUV who raced past me on my bike with 12 inches to spare just before turning in front to me into the hospital car park this morning, consider yourself TTFO.
