Words I Learned, or Relearned, in Medical School

Expires (v.): dies. Less commonly, an opposite: breathes out. Fruit falls from pecan trees in Texas, she says, and the children crush the nuts underfoot. We must do or use or spend things before they expire. I think this is the wrong word.

Exsanguinates (v.): bleeds out. “It’s unlikely that the patient exsanguinates during the procedure, but it is always a risk of renal biopsy.”

Cyanosis (n.): to be blue, not a metaphor. See also: tetralogy.

Tetralogy (n.): a Disease of Four. In this case, you’re born with it. This disease is narrowing, and is compensatory thickening. This disease is overriding. This disease is boot-shaped. This disease is a space connecting two rooms, which should have closed by now, closed so early in the other babies, but now you’re breathing air and the blood walking between those rooms is suffocating you. And then there are the others, cousins with a Disease of Two, whose holes in their heart are the only thing keeping them alive. See also: patent.

Present (v.): if you’re a patient, to simply be how you are. We are all performing all the time.

Reflect (v.): to pull back, as skin or muscle, to reveal what is deep. Usually on another person.

Appreciate (v.): to recognize the full worth of. To understand (a situation) fully. In some cases, to be grateful for or to make a polite request. Appreciate the bounding pulse. Appreciate the red reflex. Appreciate the skin’s turgor. Appreciate that the left kidney is slightly superior, anatomically speaking. Appreciate that I can use full sentences. Appreciate the nutmeg liver, how a failing right heart gives it its freckles and name. Appreciate the air-fluid level on this chest x-ray (we suspect: lung abscess). Appreciate this leg turned black from bleeding out under the skin (purpura, we suspect: idiopathic, which means we don’t know what to suspect). Appreciate that the pain is “tearing” and radiates to the back. Appreciate the lumen side of this colon under a microscope, blossoming and invading and malignant. This is real. Appreciate the yellow scar across the wall of this disembodied heart. Appreciate it and tell me how long ago they died.

Patent (adj.): open, unobstructed, allowing free passage. In the body, connecting and mixing between compartments, as in neonates with congenital heart defects. Also in pharmaceuticals, an opening for brief monopolies, until the patency closes (can give prostaglandin E drugs to prevent this, such as alprostadil, branded Prostin VR Pediatric, manufactured by Pfizer, patent approved by the FDA Jan 1982, allowing free passage in neonate hearts for the low low price of $562.03 per 5mL vial).