Putting Google to Work

For the past six months, I have been shadowing nurse practitioners (NPs), RNs, and anesthesiology residents at the preoperative clinic of a Boston hospital. 

During one of the appointments I sat in on today, the patient and his son had come from outside the U.S.. The son acted as an interpreter, and gave me and the NP a list of his father's medicines. While some of the medicines' names corresponded to the generic names used in the U.S., several of them did not. The software used by my hospital to make patient medication lists only knows U.S. generic and brand names.

What began as a challenging, but less than productive guessing game ("What's Losec?"/"It's for his stomach") changed with Google. With the NP at the computer, I fed the medication names to Google, and translated the foreign generic names to something we could use. While Losec happened to sound very close to its American trade name, Prilosec, the rest of the American drug names bore absolutely no resemblance to the foreign drug names. There was one drug name which looked (to the NP) like the generic name for a prescription medication, but turned out to be acetaminophen (Tylenol).

Using this information, we were able to write the patient's medication list for the day of surgery so that it had the American and foreign drug names side by side.

In the my hospital's operating rooms, we have a number of tools for "smarter" health care delivery, from sponges with bar codes (so we don't lose them in a patient) to robotic instruments.

Before today, I wouldn't have thought that the phone I use to read Dear Prudence on the bus could be used to make a bilingual medication list.

Another Day

Another good day at the clinic. While there weren't many kids in (it was an allergy testing day), I was busy for almost all my shift, which is not usually the case. The first half I spent drawing and playing cards with someone waiting for a sibling. She asked me for drawing tips and in turn taught me War and Slapjack. The second half I entertained a kindergartner who, in turn, showed off four of his stuffed animals and his copy of the picture book "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" (which is about a town in which it rains various kinds of food for breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday).

What surprised me today was not merely having a busy (but pleasant) shift. It was the conversation I had with the kindergartner about his stuffed animals. After he introduced each one by name and recounted who had given it to him, pointing to one and saying "this one's my favorite because Santa gave it to me!" he began telling me about the website to which each animal was registered. 

Not only were the animals registered, but they had virtual worlds. It made me imagine a Facebook-like networking site for stuffed animals. One of my friends jokingly made a Facebook profile for her plush fish and has it listed as "married" to another friends' alter ego's page (this is what happens when college students have too much free time). But this kid was talking about his stuffed animals' online world very seriously. I think his mother noticed my shock, because she informed me that there are similar websites for Cabbage Patch dolls and other dolls. When I told the boy that when I was young, the internet was very slow and that there weren't online worlds for stuffed animals, I began to feel hopelessly old. I am 20.

Is it more ridiculous for a five-year-old to register a stuffed animal to a virtual world or to feel old at 20 because the closest you got to that experience was making a pretend birth certificate for a plush giraffe you got at a college Build a Bear event?