A Doctor's Christmas Dinner

I'm stuffed. Christmas dinner with my family, a happy time spending time with grandparents, cousins, aunt and uncles, and all the good Swedish food I remember having as a kid. It's bittersweet; I'm worried that next year I'll be an intern and won't get to be home for Christmas. It's my last year on an academic schedule, the last year that I can depend on someone to protect my time. And as I was thinking about being a doctor during Christmas, my mind drifted to the many foods I learned about in medical school. Not really foods exactly; doctors seem to like to name various pathologies after the dishes they abstractly resemble. So here is my idea of a Christmas dinner for doctors, a menu of pathology.

To drink:

Port-wine

Coffee-ground

Cafe-au-lait

Rice water

Appetizers:

Anchovy paste

bread and butter with red currant jelly

caseous (cheese) necrosis

Grape clusters

Olive sign

Main dish:

Pizza pie with onion skin

Hamburger sign

Millet

Dessert:

Red cherry

Strawberry tongue

sugar coated spleen

chocolate cyst

Apple core

Banana sign with nutmeg

Here is what we are really serving:

To drink:

Port-wine stain: hemangioblastoma

Coffee-grounds: upper GI bleed emesis

Cafe-au-lait spots: neurofibromatosis

Rice water: cholera diarrhea

Appetizers:

Anchovy paste liver: amebic liver abscess

bread and butter with red currant jelly: pericarditis, klebsiella pneumonia

caseous (cheese) necrosis: tuberculosis

Grape clusters: hydatidiform mole

Olive sign: pyloric stenosis

Main dish:

Pizza pie with onion skin: cytomegalovirus retinitis and hypertensive arteriosclerosis

Hamburger sign: uncovered vertebral articular facet

Millet: spread of tuberculosis

Dessert:

Red cherry: Tay-Sachs disease

Strawberry tongue: Kawasaki disease

Sugar coated spleen: chronic spleen serositis

Chocolate cyst: hemorrhagic ovarian cyst

Apple core: colon tumor

Banana sign with nutmeg: hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and alcoholic hepatitis

These are all signs and symptoms that are clinical language to describe the diseases mentioned. Doctors just seem to describe these clinical signs in terms of a better known entity: food. Everyone knows what bread on butter looks like. So when you see a heart with pericarditis, it's a frame of reference for something you see. But it is an unappetizing way to characterize disease.

My advice: don't have holiday dinner in the doctor's lounge.