Feeling Stupid

One of the nurses was telling us about the system for getting narcs in the new hospital. I heard her say that it would use tongue prints. What she really said was thumb prints. What a relief. I wasn't sure that I wanted to lick something that had been licked by so many people before me.

She also gave us a little lecture about C diff, a common infection. She said that last year 3oo million people died from it. I started laughing and she wanted to know what was so funny. I asked her if that was in the U.S. alone. It was, which got me laughing harder. You would think something that catastrophic would make the front page of the papers, but then, who would be around to print the papers, much less read them?

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My patient told me that she takes pigitron. I asked her to repeat it several times and she was definitely saying pigitron. I looked up her records to see what she was really taking. It was pioglitazone. Now, I have to be honest, I have no idea how to pronounce that word either. That is why I pronounce it as actos, another name for the same drug. Too bad she didn't know that trick.