What’s in your DNR?

I hate to admit it, but sometimes I, and probably you, are not as smart as we think we are.  We take on a subject in an argument and find out as we are making our point, that we are making the other’s person’s point instead.  We use a word in our conversation that either means something we were not aware of, or we use it the wrong way.  Need an example?  Stand by.

When I retired from the Army I was hired by the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C. I had a great job, but my family had not moved with me.  When my wife got ill, I needed to transfer closer to them, so I was assigned to a VA Hospital as the Administrative Officer for the Department of Nursing. Career Army officer. Twenty-six years in the Infantry.  No medical background and I was the senior person in the department without nursing training.  This was like Jim Santori reporting a Category 5 Hurricane on the way to the hospital.

One day, the secretary for the Chief Nurse was not available to take notes at a meeting so I was asked to fill in for her.  Take note? Piece of cake.  How many meetings had I been to in the Army and taken notes? Too many to count.  The subject of this meeting was DNR.

I’m taking notes, doing my job when one of the participants said something like, “This month we have only had three deaths due to DNR.”  Deaths due to DNR?  How can that be?  I immediately raised my hand and interrupted the meeting.  “How can you die from that stuff they swab your cheek for? They do that so they can identify you if you get killed.  Everyone in the military gets a swab and I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any of them dying from it.”   Silence was on the face of the room, and quiet was all around.

Everyone looked at me. No one spoke.  “What?” I asked as I looked back at them.  The nurse reached out and took my hand in hers like she would have done to her three-year-old.  “That’s okay. You didn’t know. We’re talking about DNR…Do Not Resituate…that means—”

I jerked my hand away. “I got it.  I got it.  I just thought you were talking about that other stuff.”

 The head nurse again.  “That other stuff, as you call it, is DNA.”

All my notes had been geared to my understanding of what they were talking about and were completely useless with the exception of the names of the attendees.

Had I made that error in my novel, I would have made a mistake that may have cost me a sale.  If I had been using the wrong term throughout my novel, it may have taken much more than a change of initials to correct it. 

When we write, technical matters matter.  The Army no longer has Jeeps.  Law enforcement personnel don’t have the accused do the “perp walk.”  Nobody does a chalk outline of a dead body on the sidewalk. Doctors and medics don’t look up and shake their head when someone dies.  These things matter unless you’re writing science fiction, then you can make up almost anything that works.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ve got to jump in my Jeep, kill someone with a look from my eyes and teleport to the planet Framistat.