Heck Of A Guy

This is a convoluted story so, as they say, attention must be paid.

A couple of days ago, I threw in three or four throwaway paragraphs about adaptations of popular phrases and misused medical terms I had heard from my patients.

So far, so so.

Then, Mrs. Linklater of the especially entertaining Mrs. Linklater’s Guide to the Universe , commented that the three malapropisms/mondegreens I’d listed

• Screaming Meemie Jesus (Spinal Meningitis)
• Fireballs Of The Eucharist (Fibroids of the Uterus)
• The Roaches Of The Liver (Cirrhosis of the Liver)

were also known to her from “rounds of Duke Medical School in the sixties” (clearly, Mrs. Linklater was a child prodigy who matriculated at Duke in mid-pubescence).

I was not, on reflection, surprised that my Michael Reese patients from the south side of Chicago (AKA “the baddest part of town” according to the lyrics of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”) shared a patois with folks in North Carolina, but Mrs. Linklater’s comment led me to realize that, of course, there could be quite a lot of misused medical terminology out there. And I was just the DrGuy to find it.

Being an early adopter of Google (I was Googling before “Googling” was a verb) and a locked-in, hard core adherent of the GIYBF (Google Is Your Best Friend) cult, my next step was obvious. Google found – well, it found too much good stuff. I, for example, never had a patient refer to her Utopian Tubes, although I certainly wish I had. While I still prefer my patient’s use of Screaming Meemie Jesus to indicate spinal meningitis, Mrs Linklater’s Smilin’ Mighty Jesus is OK too. Yet, Google comes up with still another variation, Singing Merry Jesus. There are also Google-found references to

• Very-Close Veins (Varicose Veins)
• Sick-As-Hell Anemia (Sickle Cell Anemia)
• Tubal Litigation (Tubal Ligation)
• Sixty-Five Roses (Cystic Fibrosis)

There are, as it turns out, articles about misused healthcare terms published in medical journals, there are stories in the popular press, and there are books written and sold about these things. There are, for goodness sake, books and articles that focus exclusively on medical malaprops that originate from children.

Well, this Google-mine of wordplay made my original three item offering look pretty pitiful. But, I’m thinking, there might be a silver lining; maybe I can develop this experience into a reasonably clever posting of the there is nothing new under the sun, especially if you check Google first sort. You know – the flip side of huge, immediately accessible repositories of knowledge is awareness that your mom wasn’t really the first to mix pancake syrup and peanut butter into a taste treat and that you weren’t the first one to come up with the joke about the ravioli, the avocado, the ambidextrous chicken, and the farmer’s daughter. It’s the old take a chomp from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thing.

So I was Googling for background material and – you guessed her, Chester – found a October 18, 2002 posting by the inestimable Defective Yeti which, – well, which is the essay I was going to write, except that I like his beginning better, “You know what the problem with the Internet is? It’s that every knucklehead with a great idea can go online and blab about it. So, now, whenever I have a great idea, and I search Google to make sure that I am the first person ever to think of it, I always wind up with, like 74,000 hits. Lame.”

Mr. Yeti ends his posting with ” So the moral of this story is: if you have a great idea, don’t be selfish and put it on the web or tell anyone about it.” (Yeah, do as I say, not as I do.)

Anyway, Google, my trusted ally, suckered me in with medical malaprops and then bitch slapped me with Defective Yeti.

I had been Google-Crossed (alt spelling: Googlecrossed)

(And, yes, I checked – Google doesn’t seem to have a listing for “Google-Crossed” used in this manner. So there.)

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