Looking for an 80 year old stroke patient I was supposed to do a consult on...
Me: "I can't find the patient. Is he still on this floor?"
Nurse: "Oh, he was transferred to the NICU."
Me: "!!!"
Apparently, in some hospitals, the NICU stands for the North ICU (or Neuro ICU).
"The regular unit was full and they had empty beds/cribs."
ReplyDeleteSexist! How dare you identify him as a male, or even think it important to your diagnosis.
ReplyDeleteAgeist! How dare you identify him by age, or even think it important to your diagnosis.
Whoresoftheinternet, the age is important if you knew that generally NICU means Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, an intensive care unit specialized for newly born infants.
Delete-MK
Technically she only identified him as a male because of the need to use a pronoun and English doesn't have genderless personal pronouns.
DeleteOr she already knew the gender of the patient because she was looking for him?
DeleteOne day in clinicals I had to phone various people in the NICU, MICU, and MICU. That's not a typo. That hospital used the same acronym for the Medical Intensive Care Unit as it did for the Monitored Intermediate Care Unit.
ReplyDeleteThe latter used to just be called "intermediate stepdown," but they changed it-- because, I suppose, having one MICU on the same floor as the NICU wasn't confusing enough.