Monday, September 12, 2011

Looking for a new word for that spelling bee or that game of scrabble?

So it seems the Wales supporters from my previous entry got their prediction wrong.  Although from what I have briefly seen on TV was that it was a very close match.

Now with Bianca's 2 year anniversary I have been reading through some old blog entries in our old blog.  And I remembered that one of the biggest words I ever learned was the word panhypogammaglobulinemia.

This is what I wrote on the 30th of April 2008 (click here for the original entry) -
"So here is a new word for you: Panhypogammaglobulinemia (wow, I wonder how many years of study is spent learning the pronunciation of these big fancy medical words).

"Please spell Panhypogammaglobulinemia"
"Can you use it in a sentence?"
"Sure, Bianca was diagnosed with Panhypogammaglobulinemia"

Now that is a spelling bee tongue twister for you... And it is a real word too all you Scrabble fans out there (although you probably won't have enough letters or space on the board to make up this word).

I noticed this word on the most recent copy of Bianca's discharge notes. Basically it means her immunoglobulin levels were low and as a result she got an IVIG transfusion."
 I think once one of Bianca's oncologists said in the 14 years (I think he said that was how long it took him to study to become what he became) they learned something like 15,000 new words in their vocabulary.  Of course I can't understand why they can't just use normal ordinary words to say what is wrong and why they have to use words that nobody (ordinary people like me) had ever heard of.  Well I certainly have never heard of the word panhypogammaglobulinemia until this day in 2008.

2 comments:

Hayley said...

How do you even begin to pronounce that!

Lea White said...

With much effort. :-)