Language Arts

I'm going to start taking my own reading material when I visit Josh (otherwise known as "my-son- the-doctor") and Jerilyn.  They have a whole library of books but if you only have time to read a magazine it is true doctor's office style:  The first one I picked up Thanksgiving week-end was from May of 2008.  I think it was called POPULAR SURGERY or something like that.  There was a fascinating essay on "Preventable Morbidity in Mature Trauma Centers".  I just skimmed over it, of course.  I think there was an article called "Fun with Enterocutaneous Fistulas" and possibly "Whipples Gone Wild, A Panorama of Pancreaticoduodenectomy," but I may have those titles mixed up.

The pictures were equally mesmerizing, but I won't go into details because some of you may be planning on eating dinner right after you read this.  Suffice it to say they hit new heights in graphic portrayal.  Fortunately the captions under the pictures were written in Medicaleze, a language I have yet to master, so I wasn't sure if I was looking at the inside of someone's stomach, a swollen spleen the size of an SUV or a tumor in the shape of South Dakota recently removed, yet lovingly preserved for posterity through the magic of photography.

Josh began learning this language in his pre-med classes even before he got to medical school and he loved to regale us with it.  Show him a rash on your arm and he would nod sagely and say "It's probably raftdaftikitis, whobucktikitis, tillyumacknitis of the brain.  Your little flee-aflipper is very, very bad and your ring-a-tinga-tinger has been sprained."  Or something like that. And we bought it every time.  Well, his dad and I did. Brothers are a little less easily impressed and it didn't take Jake long to wonder if he was being wolfed. "Don't ask him!" he would say no matter what the question.  "We have to leave in an hour and a half and it will take more than that for him to explain it."

Fortunately, or maybe not, the further Josh progressed in his education the more taciturn he became and now it is not easy to get any information out of him at all.  Surgeons are trained to take everything in stride and unless there is arterial bleeding or near lack of brain activity he says "It'll be fine." and won't tell us anything. I hear him dictating over the phone sometimes but that is a dialect of  Medicaleze that they taught him in med school, called "Talking-Faster-Than-the-Speed-of-Sound" that only highly trained medical transcriptionists can understand.

What worries me is that this language thing may be hereditary.  While we were visiting, David, his sixth-grade son, was copying letters from the Russian alphabet and trying to learn how to pronounce them.  He had progressed to that after working on Greek last week and his mom said he asked about Latin today.  Can Medicaleze be far behind?

 I think it's because there are no good magazines to read at their house. What happened to the HI-LITES subscription David had?