Love Those Old-Time Peds Guys

From the Right Time comments:

When my son swallowed a penny, the doctor asked if we knew the year. Yes, we did (it was from my older son's collection.) We told him.

The doctor said "That's a worthless penny. I've already got it in my collection. Just let it pass."

I'm reminded of a story a patient told me of her old pediatrician: she called him frantically one day upon finding her daughter eating kibble from the dog's bowl.

His response: "Is she barking?"

*****

Something is bothering me. Back in the day -- my med school day, that is -- the Blades vs. the Fleas (with an awesome West Side Story take-off for Skit Night) was the way we described the eternal divide between Surgery ("to cut is to cure") and Medicine ("last to leave a dying dog".) How and when was the term "flea" was co-opted by pediatrics?

*****

Also from a long ago Skit Night:

Surgical Attending: Dr. Resident: what procedure do you suggest for this patient?
Dr Resident: Uh...uh...I think we should do a lap chole*.
S.A.: Lap chole? Lap chole? This is a seventeen-year-old girl with a broken elbow. Why should we do a lap chole?
Dr. R: I'm a surgeon. Surgeons are supposed to do what they do best. Lap chole is what I do best.


*Short for laparoscopic cholecystectomy; removal of the gallbladder through a series of tiny little incisions instead of one huge right upper quadrant one. In the original joke, the operation quoted was a "feeding gastrostomy", an ancient procedure frequently performed before someone figured out how to stick an endoscope up against the abdominal wall and get a trained monkey -- er, assistant -- to numb up the spot, poke a hole and push in the feeding tube. (The so-called PEG -- Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy -- tube.) It's so easy the surgical interns are doing them on each other these days so they don't have to stop working just to eat.