Catching On

Every now and then you realize you’re way too deep in what you do for a living…

Have you ever played Catch Phrase? It’s a great game. The electronic version is a fat disc that shows unusual word or phrases on a screen, and teams of two or more players try to guess the word or phrase. When one team gets it right, the disc is passed to the next team. There’s a timer in the device that beeps with ever-increasing urgency, and the team holding the device when the buzzer goes off loses the round. You can guess that this leads to the disc being flung about like a hot potato as time grows short. It’s kind of like Password on steroids.

Anyway, I’m over at a friend’s house the other night, and a bunch of us ED folks are playing Catch Phrase. It’s my turn to guess the answer, and my partner Kristin is looking at the screen. She turns to me and says “People do this all the time in the ER,” and she starts to gag and make a gesture with her hand like things are coming out of her mouth.

I knew exactly what she was doing. It is something people do all the time. It’s one of my least favorite bodily functions that expels one of my least favorite bodily fluids. (Blood, urine, lung stuff I can handle. GI secretions? I’m outta there.) But I know too many words for it, including:

Vomiting
Vomicking
Nauselated and Vomicking
Barfing
Upchucking
Regurgitating
Worshipping the Porcelain God
Producing the Technicolor Rainbow
Aspirating
Aspiration Pneumonia
Aspiration Pneumonia in a Nursing Home Patient
What you do when Administration Comes by

After about a minute and a half of this, with the beeping growing more intense and frantic, she grabs me by the collar. “WHAT AM I DOING?” she shouts?

“You’re throwing up, right?”

“RIGHT! IT’S THROW UP. THROW UP! LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE SAY! THEY THROW UP!”

And the disc was passed.