Dedicated to all my Nurse Buds, Clinical Peeps and the Yacht Club Crew.
Years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, my brother and I raced one-design sailboats. Our purple bluejay “Chicken of the Sea” was a fun little boat to sail but one of us, I can’t remember who (and yes, I wouldn’t tell you if I could remember) had a problem with the names of all of the lines at the foot of the mast. Try as we might, we couldn’t always get it together with that which needed to be raised up or down, pulled in or let out.
There was always yelling.
“Pull that thingy over there!!” one of us would say.
“Which one?” the other would ask - which just lead to more incessant pointing - “that one, that one, NO - THAT ONE!!!”
(jib sheet, main line, and every halyard subsequently became referred to as “thingy”)
To solve all of our problems, my mother took all of the lines off the boat and brought them all down into the laundry room of our home. She bought many tie-dye kits and in a matter of hours all of our thingies (halyards and sheets) took on a new life of their own.
The main halyard was green, the jib sheets were purple, the spinnaker sheets were a great shade of orange that faded with the sun and salt water.
Our world became easier as we raced. I would hear “pull in the purple one, let out the orange one..” it was the sweet color of communication.
Over the last few years, I have been asked to be more cautious around the clinical terms I use when analyzing people / situations (insert “symptoms and dynamics” here if you studied psych). This has not been easy for me. My colleague and nurse wizard, Kathy Weil used to help me present our psych protocol to teams throughout the hospital where we worked. In the elevator on the way to each department she would say to me “now try not to be so clinical this time” and then interrupt me if, during our presentation, she would witness the glazed over look of the nurses and techs we were presenting to. I struggled (and continue to) with changing the terminology; and I’ve come to know “the look” when it’s flashed my way by my nurse colleagues.
It’s frustrating as I know none of my nurse colleagues would ever enter a room and say “we’re going to hang a bottle of this water stuff to go through a tube into your arm so that you will not feel so dry”, or I’m going to put a bunch of small, white circular, sticky things all connected to wires over your body so we can connect them to an electronic dohicky and watch your heart beat. Instead we use a bunch of acronyms and sometimes scarey terms like IV, EKG, EEG, MRI, CVA, TPA, TPN, stroke, ‘mets’, 'septic' and the one that freaks me out - “widow maker”.
All of which (I think) are a little more overwhelming then ‘depressed’, ‘anxious’ or ‘symptomatology’ and if I were to bet a nice lobster dinner (with chowdah and steemahs), I’d say that “widow maker” freaks more people out then “bipolar”, "suicidal" or “traumatogenic” - just sayin’.
And yes, sometimes I’d much prefer to tell people they’ve “drifted a little too far from the mother ship” then tell them that I think we need to refer them to an inpatient unit - but that’s not appropriate. It can be a little frustrating for someone who’s a shrimp fork short of a place setting or half a sandwich short of a combination plate. And it wouldn’t make my NAMI colleagues pleased at all.
Throw in the fast pace of an ED and the stress that goes with it to the terminology mix and watch what happens. Recently, one of the nurses was performing CPR and wanted to get a little higher over the patient. “I need a footstool” she said. One of my colleagues went outside and came back with one of the stools that the Docs sit on when interviewing patients - the one with the wheels - while another came in with the metal footstool - the one she was referring to. The nurse (who had switched with a colleague from performing CPR) took it all in stride as she was handed the footstool, looked at the stool with the wheels and said “yeah, that might be a little too challenging”.
And it’s all relative anyway. - I have a close friend who is an acupuncturist. One day I went to see her as I had been feeling really tired and she said “yeah, you have a little too much water energy”. A few months before when I had some pain, she had told me “I think you have a block in your triple heater meridian”.
“A block in my triple heater meridian? - you’re kidding right?”
She explained what she meant in terms I would understand (yes, she ‘dumbed it down’ for me) and then put a few needles in my right ankle which made a lot of sense to me given she had just explained that ‘triple heater meridian’ was nowhere near my right ankle. At the end of it all, I felt much better.
That’s eastern medicine - the one that’s been around for 3000 years as opposed to the “newer” western medicine that has only been around for a few hundred. The closest thing I’ve ever heard to the term “widow maker” in Eastern medicine is what’s referred to an “H/W - husband / wife imbalance” which isn’t all that different when you think about it - based on the acuity I guess.
But in my world of clinical psych, maybe it would all just be a whole lot better if we got back to colors. “She’s feeling a little blue” (for depression) or maybe “that orange person over there” for someone who’s psychotic and drifted a little to far - who maybe needs their sails pulled in...that’s the purple thingy.