When doctors call an ER patient a "potato chip," what do they mean?
·
Follow
Retired Family Physician
When doctors call an ER patient a "potato chip," what do they mean?
Interesting read from a former Physician
When I first started out in practice, i had to work in the ER to make extra money. We used terms to signify things that we couldn’t say. Saying a person had a “high porcelain level” meant that they were a crock of baloney. If someone came in from a nursing home with barely any neurologic function, the term was a GOMER which stood for “get out of my ER “. When you worked in ER the attending called you a “wall” or “sieve”. The Wall admitted no one and the Sieve admitted everyone. If I was on medicine ER rotation and I wanted to spare my fellow residents, I would PUNT to the surgical service, so they had to admit them. One thing to know is that working in ER is very stressful and so we would use humor to help with our fears. Hopefully the patients don’t pay attention. However, the people who work the ER are very dedicated. They save the butts of the medicine attending by doing the initial workup. They see so much trauma that they are immune to it, so a gunshot victim is treated like a sore throat victim. As a Family Medicine attending, I was always thankful for the work of the ER doctors.