Friday, July 15, 2011

a most difficult title

Today was my 6-year old daughter's last day of her science camp this week.  They were supposed to dress up as crazy scientists.  Of course my husband had a perfect short lab coat for her to wear and we found some wacky glasses.  The camp counselor commented on her outfit upon her arrival and asked if she knew someone in her family who was a doctor.  She replied, "Yes.  My dad."  The girl asked what kind of doctor he is.  She quickly responded, "He puts people to sleep."

Yikes.  I laughed so hard.  I guess we do not emphasize sufficiently his waking people up during our conversations.

So all the way home from camp we all practiced saying anesthesiologist over and over again.

But, I often talk with adults that do not know what an anesthesiologist is or does.  Maybe it won't matter if they know how to pronounce their dad's title, and can only describe the important aspects of his line of work.

People still might not get it.

I quietly wondered if I should train them instead to say, he gives epidurals, because then everyone would say, "Ooohhh!  I love those doctors!"

5 comments:

Britt-Marie said...

That's pretty funny. And I can just hear them all stumbling over "anesthesiologist" You should film that.

Jamie Lamb said...

Hilarious!

KT said...

Love it! So funny!
Hope you are all doing well!

Mrs. F said...

Girl, you have a terrific blog and I will be checking back on a regular basis.

Also, my father is an Anesthesiologist and luckily he wasn't practicing until I was old enough to properly enunciate his profession :)

Anonymous said...

I am married to an anesthesiologist,and I like to describe his job this way: "He keeps people alive during surgery." (Not that I actually say that, but I would if I could without being overbearing.) People like to think it is the surgeon who is keeping the patient alive, but in reality the surgeon is concentrating on the procedure at hand, and it is the anesthesiologist who is making sure the patient is doing okay, breathing, heartrate, ph levels, blood loss, etc., etc., and making decisions about what to do when intervention is needed. And the anesthesiologist runs the code if the patient crashes during the surgery (a fortunately not-very-frequent occurrence).