KS, Baby

Walked into a scene right of "Angels in America" last night.
This play is so embedded in me that it will never leave me.
30 years in the AIDS epidemic, I saw my first Kaposi's sarcoma last night, uncommon in the age of antiretrovirals - and the scene below flickered in my mind.



In eliciting the "history of present illness," I saw that the patient and his partner were more like Prior and Louis. I was spared the crying, but not the drama of it all.

Dropsy

Finally getting around to "Downton Abbey", a Masterpiece Classic update of "Upstairs / Downstairs" on PBS last year.
Loving it more now that they introduced a nurse as one of the main characters - an undesirable addition to the titled family because of her profession. She saves a man's life by advocating for pericardiocentesis and a dose of adrenaline on a patient with dropsy.

Dropsy?!

"Dropsy to the heart or the liver?" she asks.

What in Flo's sake is dropsy?
A colloquial British term I've never heard of?
Google to the rescue; dropsy means edema.
So, what other archaic terms for medical conditions that have gone the way of smallpox.
Le grippe, consumption, ague, coryza, Saint Vitus's dance, suppuration ...
Not to mention the more recent ones. We don't call it left-sided or right-sided heart failure anymore. It's now either systolic or diastolic dysfunction.

Since gerontology will be my specialty, someone old enough is bound to use them. I can only imagine:

"What can I do for you today, Mr. Smith?"
"My podagra's acting up again."