Sinister Organs

My husband and I like to watch “Jeopardy” after we clear the dinner dishes and wipe up the kitchen. It’s not that we know many answers/questions,  in fact we feel fortunate if between the two of us, we are able to answer a half dozen correctly. But there are those categories that we do better at. I get excited if there is a category that is medically or biblically oriented. I can often come close to ‘running the category’ in those two subjects.

This past week I lit up when I saw the category “The Human Body”. “Oh, boy,” I smiled and settled into my spot next to Stan on the reclining loveseat. I pulled the lever to elevate my feet, threw the fleece blanket over my legs, and settled in.  I anticipated a favorable outcome, so be it if it was only in one category.   I eagerly waited for the contestants to move off of “Classic Albums”, and “The Calendar” of which I hadn’t bothered to even guess the answers. “Come on,” I pleaded, “pick human body.”  I couldn’t wait to redeem myself!

Then it happened. The contestant in control, moved over to MY category. I beat the contestants in answering the first two clues.  Great….I was on a roll. Third clue: In relation to organs in the body, sinister refers to this. What? I leaned in and read it again. I could not remember the word sinister ever mentioned in my nursing studies  – except to describe the one instructor that gloated on writing difficult questions into her tests. And in forty plus years of experience, I could not recall anyone relating organs to sinister.  This must be a geographical  clue, I thought – something that is relative to California where they film “Jeopardy” and not Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota where I had practiced. There was one small consolation – the three contestants were in my boat – none of them rang in. Alex Trebek seemed to get some satisfaction over enlightening us with the answer as he tipped his head downward, lifted his eyebrows upward, and spoke  slowly. Sinister organs are those organs on the left side of the body.

Really? I had never heard such a thing.  In an effort to solidify my hunch that this was a geographical issue, I  grabbed my phone and tapped on the  Facebook icon. I was determined to find out if any of my Midwest nursing friends had heard of this before. I was quite confident that most of them would be as much in the dark as I had been.   Okay folks, I wrote…who knows what it means when you are referring to a sinister organ?

Within seconds (too soon for anyone to look it up) a nurse I had worked with fifteen years earlier (in Wyoming)  wrote one word – left. Well…she was probably watching “Jeopardy” too. In her next entry she wrote simply: OS/OD. Left eye/right eye. Excuse the pun – but this wasn’t looking good for me.

I knew the initials OS and OD were abbreviations for  some long, difficult to pronounce  Latin words that would mean left eye and right eye.  My friend typed back: Sinister/Direct. Hmmm…not exactly Latin or unpronounceable. My friend didn’t bother to tell me what the “O” stood for. That’s okay – I had my smart phone.  Oculus – an eyelike opening. I was glad something was finally making sense. But, even with these reminders, I could not recall ever learning the actual words that “OS” and “OD” stood for. The one thing I did remember was a very useful “little ditty” a military nurse taught me about “OS” and “OD” and how to remember which eye belonged to which letters.  “OD stands for Officer of the Day,” she had said without hesitation,  “and they are always right.” Now, that is something that stuck with me!

This Jeopardy experience encouraged me to delve deeper into why we remember some things and not others. I learned that our minds have a property known as “brain plasticity” and are always changing depending on our environment and what our needs for learning are. One article explained that our brains go through a natural synaptic pruning process, much like we give our rosebushes  in the fall.  Neurons that are rarely or never used eventually die, but new stronger connections are formed based on what we need at the time.  Based on the assumption that my nursing instructors had taught us about oculus direct and oculus sinister, I may have dismissed the information as unimportant as long as I knew what the commonly used abbreviations meant. When the doctor wrote an order for two drops to be put in the patient’s “OD” I knew exactly where to place them – thanks to my military friend.

Now that I’ve retired from nursing, there are bound to be neural pathways that have been active with medical facts and knowledge that will be pruned back. But, I’m looking forward to the new pathways that are forming.  I already see it happening  in my line dancing class. I’m not sure why the wonderful ladies in my class didn’t send me hiking when I started a year ago. Oh my….I was an uncoordinated newborn filly in a ring of sophisticated thoroughbreds. Now…well, I’m no species to write home about yet…but I’m standing securely on my own two feet and having a great time.

Until next month…keep on readin’ and I’ll keep on writin’.