Better Health: Smart Health Commentary Better Health (TM): smart health commentary

Article Comments

How My Husband Gets My Attention

Ok, I’ll admit it – I spend a lot of time on the Internet. Sometimes I ignore my husband while I’m blogging or emailing folks in the evenings or weekends. I know I need to find better “life balance” and give at least my immediate family (kitty and hubby) the right amount of attention.

Regular readers of my blog know that my husband is a funny guy. Lately he has really outdone himself. When I’m deep into a blog post or an email and he wants me to listen to him, he has taken to pulling on my “doctor-heart strings” by announcing that he has a certain disease or condition that needs attention. Of course, my husband is not a physician, so he isn’t sure how to use all the medical terminology that he hears here and there. This is what he said yesterday when I was on the Internet:

Hubby: Help!

Dr. Val: Mrpmph.

Hubby: Help! I need help!

Dr. Val: Hrmph, sigh.

Hubby: Help! I have antalgic encephalopathy!*

Dr. Val: (Cogs and wheels turning as I consider what that fake disease would actually look like). Ha, ha, ha! Ok, honey I get it – you need a hug and some attention.

*For non-doctors: “antalgic” is almost always used to describe a limp to alleviate pain when walking. “Encephalopathy” means degeneration of brain function. So I guess a person with antalgic encephalopathy would be walking funny due to some sort of brain infection/disorder.

How does your significant other get your attention?This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.


You may also like these posts

    None Found

Read comments »


Comments are closed.

Return to article »

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

Read more »

How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

Read more »

See all interviews »

Latest Cartoon

See all cartoons »

Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

Read more »

The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

Read more »

Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

Read more »

See all book reviews »

Commented - Most Popular Articles