on abbreviations, jargon, and indoctorination

02Nov09

So I guess there comes a time in the process of indoctorination… I mean indoctrination (hahaha, I am so cute) – when ‘x’ just becomes shorthand for everything and you don’t even think twice about it anymore.

I always used to think it made perfect sense when they hit me with the first few, like Hx for history and Dx for diagnosis. It went something like this: “Well, okay, I guess the ‘x’ replaces the ssssss, like maybe ‘hixtory’. And I guess ‘diagnosis’ sort of does have an ‘x’ sound, doesn’t it? ‘Diagnoxis’. Yeah. That sounds right. So of course the shorthand for history is Hx, and of course the shorthand for Diagnosis is Dx.” And especially after you’ve written out the first few SOAP notes, you’re grateful for not having to write out the word “history” at least twenty times, on top of all the sectional headings that include the word. And over the course of the year, I saw “fracture” variably reduced to “fx” or “fxr” (in Kristen’s notes) and “function” to “fx” or my personal “fxn” and I didn’t think anything of it.

Then came the day I sat in “How to Write a SOAP Note That Will Impress Your Attendings 101″, whereupon “antibiotics” became “abx” and treatment became “Tx” and surgery became “Sx” and I remembered that “prescription” really did become “Rx” and I finally realized that none of it actually made phonetic sense and was never supposed to, either. I kind of had to laugh at myself a lot because it had taken me two years of seeing the acronyms and using them quite liberally to even come to that realization. One thing, I did have to do in my brain, though, was rewire where I had sometimes written down “abx” for antibodies even though I actually meant “ab”. Antibodies, antibiotics, oh, what’s the difference anyway?

Well, today in pathophys, we started talking about arrhythmias and gap junctions. After writing “gap junction” down once, I proceeded to write it down in shorthand. I paused for about two seconds to think about how I had done it in the past, way back in undergrad when I was having to write down “junction” about eighty times every lecture hour, wrote down “gap jx” and then moved on to listening to what Uncle Lenny was saying. It wasn’t until maybe six minutes later that I realized that I had never written down “jx” for junction before in my life. I had always abbreviated it as “jct” and if I had ever used an ‘x’ it would have probably been written “jxn”, but never just straight up “jx”.

… yeah. I knew they said it would come quickly; on our first day of medical school they told us that we were probably best equipped to talk to patients right then as we were because we had the medical knowledge base of the average layperson. We didn’t know the jargon, we didn’t know the lingo, so we knew to explain things in simple words because that was all we knew, but that period would be gone oh-too-quickly. And I guess, well, here’s the proof.

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Tags: life, lingo, silly