Watermelons

Today the actual AIR temperature is zero to -2. And don’t even think about the wind chill! As I went to my ER shift tonight, even with my down coat and my hothands in my boots and mittens, I thought I might freeze to death as I crunched through the dangerous-looking sparkling, frozen-solid snow.  So, then, why am I thinking about watermelon in February in Chicago? Apparently I am at risk for something called “watermelon stomach.” I learned this in the clinic note that my rheumatologist wrote– and mailed me. She was the concerned that because I had increasing numbers of telangectasias on my face and in my mouth (see? I’m not crazy) and so she wrote in her letter that she was worried about my developing watermelon stomach.   Apparently, in people with scleroderma, telangectasias can also develop in the stomach, in a weirdly stripy pattern resembling a watermelon (see picture).   It’s actually not too serious as these things go;  the fragile blood vessels in the stomach near the surface of the lining break open and can cause bleeding. Most of the time, the condition can be cured using a scope and laser surgery to burn up the tissue.   The name of this new (to me) process made me think that it’s a weird propensity of doctors to name things after food. In pathology, we learned about all kinds of things named after different foods (”strawberry tongue” in strep throat; “cherry red” for carbon monoxide poisoning; “prune belly” a childhood syndrome; “sausage digits” in patients with psoriatic arthritis, etc, etc).  I always thought it was odd, sitting in medical school lectures, to learn about a horrendous disease process that was almost gleefully named after food.  Medical school teaches you how to place a distance between you and the patient: the first three months at medical school are spent dissecting a dead human being. After a while, the weirdness passes and the time spent dissecting becomes mundane– that dead person, so terrifying just a short time before, becomes just an object of study.  Oddly, the formaldahyde preservative makes you starvingly hungry; we would all dash to the cafeteria after our morning’s work for a huge lunch. Perhaps pathologists are just a hungry bunch, having been exposed to formaldahyde throughout their careers.  But I also think that naming scary things after something known, even comforting (like food) echos the distance that we learn in medical school to put between our patient and ourselves.