Devin keeps harassing me because I keep forgetting to put an important fact into the family letter and I fill it up with trivial stuff. January 9 Devin and I went into LDS Family Services and started the process to adopt through them. We have gotten all the paperwork in and much of the starting paperwork done. We are happy to start this process and are looking forward to adoption. We are still currently foster parents but we have not had any children placed with us.
This week Devin had her first test for one of her classes that I can no pronounce or spell properly. One evening this week she asked me to help her study for her test. Devin had a cheat sheet that had lots of abbreviations and conversions. I believe that medical people have an unhealthy obsession with a language that has been dead for a very long time. Really, Latin? Why pick a dead language? Pick a living one. It all started out with a line that looked like this “s= without (with a line above it)” What does “without with a line” mean in the first place? It almost seems like a contradiction in terms. It ends up meaning “without” but why would any one ever think this by the line describing the abbreviation? I had to get moving one and we soon came to “hs”. I immediately knew what this was an abbreviation for, High School. I knew that I could probably remember this one but when I looked at what it stood for in medical circles it means bedtime. I am sure that no sane person would shorten bed time to “hs” but I guess that doctors are not sane. I will use my brother Brian as an example. I know he is not a doctor yet but he is going to school to become one. Then we got to 2 that look exactly the same to me, OS and os. I know it looks the same to most of you but the capitalization is the difference. Also if someone wrote this by hand how would you know witch one to use because “O” and “S” look almost the same lower case as upper case? I was starting to realize why doctors need to go through so much school. They need to learn lots of retarded things that make no sense. It ends up OS is “left eye” and os is “mouth”. I still wonder if someone had an infection in their left eye and they were given an oral medication (Devin disputes that would likely never happen), that described application by os, if someone would put the oral medication into their eye. Moving on, we come to “NPO”. I know this as a Non-Profit Organization. I know that there are many medical NPOs and I figured that this was a reference to the help they can give to patients in need. It ends up meaning “Nothing by mouth” N makes scene but “P” for “by” and “O” for “mouth”. Devin claims that “os” is latin for “mouth” and it is plainly clear but normal people would disagree. Devin had trouble remembering what “ung” stood for. I tried to convince her that the UN was full of Goobers and that they sat around rubbing each other with lotion. Devin clams that “ung” stands for “ointment”. I did not see much difference between her explanation and mine. Except my reasoning happened in a specific building. Then came the conversions. Most of them were quite simple: 1oz = 30ml == 30cc. But then we came to one that I could not stand. Being an engineer I realized that the conversion was completely wrong. The conversion states “Pounds to kilograms = divide by 2.2”. Now those of you who know anything about pounds and kilograms you know that they measure two completely different things. Pounds is a force measurement and kilograms is a mass measurement. As an example if you have a 10kg bag of flour on the surface of the earth it weights roughly 22lbs. If the bag of flour is taken into orbit in a spaceship the bag of flour is still 10kg, but the bag of flour now weighs 0lbs. The conversion they are talking about only works if you are on the surface of earth. That is a huge difference. Devin claims that since almost all humans are currently living on the surface of the earth that the difference is minimal. I disagree and think that if you want to measure weight in the metric system you need to use newtons. Well even with the ambiguous abbreviations and totally wrong conversions on the paper Devin went in and took her test on Friday and she got an amazing 98% on the test. She only missed one question. I am hoping she learned something about mass and weight and correctly answered a question and can contest the answer. The teacher should be impressed wither her knowledge either way. We hope all of you in school get as good grades as Devin and we hope the rest of you just enjoy not taking tests.
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