Online Exclusive: The Facts of Fiction
Novelist and award-winning short story writer Jacob M. Appel schools writers on getting their facts straight when writing fictional doctors and patients.
In “The Facts of Fiction” compilation article in the September 2014 Writer’s Digest, physician, novelist and award-winning short story writer Jacob M. Appel schools writers on getting their facts straight when writing fictional doctors and patients. Here, in this special online exclusive sidebar we didn’t have space to print, he shares a quick cheat sheet to hospital wings and wards.
Time in the Hospital
Stat – Immediately
BID – Twice a day
TID – Three times a day
QHS – At bedtime
Places in the Hospital
PACU - Post-anesthesia care unit. Patients initially recover from surgery here, not in the operating room (OR) itself.
PICU – Pediatric intensive care unit
MICU – Medical intensive care unit
RICU – Respiratory intensive care unit
NICU – Neonatal intensive care unit, not to be confused with the Neuro ICU, the neurologic intensive care unit
ER or ED – Patients visit emergency rooms; these days, physicians prefer to think of themselves as working for emergency departments
Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney and bioethicist based in New York City. He is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review’s Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and more. Visit him at jacobmappel.com.
