There is no such word as "transendenberg." Or paranesia, for that matter. But, most of you say, we never imagined they were! We spend too much time worrying about things that do exist to worry about things that do not! You probably also spend most of your time laboring under the delusion that those tasked with instructing students of technical arts like medicine are aware of the proper vocabulary for their chosen field.
You would, sadly, be wrong. Both of the above un-words are creations of a lab instructor at my Well-Respected Nursing Program. The first is a mangled version of "Trendelenberg," the bed position that puts a patient's feet higher than their head (useful for times when you want as much blood as possible going to the brain), The word TRENDELENBERG is long, I admit, but it is pronounced exactly as it is spelled and is literally on the first page of our lab manual because it is the very first thing you learn in nursing, after taking vital signs. The instructor's version is notable for not only being a totally incorrect rendering of the term, but also for being more incorrect than the student whose pronunciation she was correcting. This was not a one-time error; she was heard to use the word in a different class later that day.
"Paranesia," on the other hand, is not a real word being misused or a mostly-real word with a few letters wrong. It is completely, completely, completely made up. The closest I could find in the ENTIRE INTERNET was the word paraenesis, a British term for a form of debate rhetoric. I also concede that Paranesia is the name of a character of some kind in a gaming community, but I neither play nor understand video games. The word my instructor was TRYING to produce was "proprioception," the normal sensation of knowing where your body is in space (if you shut your eyes and I move your hand, you still know where your hand is without looking at it).
Why is this a problem? Well, for one thing, because general ignorance is a problem. Secondly, this is not an after-school pottery class that the basketball coach was forced to teach, or an orphaned Boy Scout Troop that drafted someone's mom as den mother. This is nursing school. A nurse may not probe as deeply into a patient's diagnosis as a doctor but he is the primary caretaker and advocate for that patient during their hospital stay or office visit, which is no small responsibility. He had better be able to get an IV line in on the first try, bathe the patient and change their sheets without removing them from bed, chart data continuously, run interference on the family members if any are present, and provide patient teaching for any new information (like what asthma is or how to check blood sugar). Bonus points if the patient is under 5, because that child will have the strength of ten men when angered.
Do I want a doctor to know the word "medication?" You betcha. Do I want a nurse to know the word "Trendelenberg?" Yes, and for the same reason. "Proprioception" is less a need-to-know term than an indicator that my instructor was willing to make something up when she didn't know the right answer, which is troublesome (improvising is good; lying, not so much). It betrays a few other things, like the fact that a woman in her sixties with more than forty years of experience did not know a very fundamental term, but this is of small and personal consequence. On the grand scale, primarily, if an educated person cannot sound educated even to their peers, how to they sound to those under their care? And why are they allowed to disseminate their misinformation to the new generation?
Go ahead, google paranesia, I know you're dying to.
