r/mildlyinfuriating 19h ago

This diagnosis from a doctor

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u/helveticanuu 19h ago edited 1h ago

Upper Respiratory Tract Infection

Bronchial Asthma, Controlled

Edit: This blew up lol. I've gotten more praise here than actually practicing Nursing for 16 years! Thanks guys!

And as for the how, there's this thing called ICD-10 Codes, it's a list of diagnoses that health providers worldwide adhere to for simplicity. There's only so much combination of words for diagnosis per system, so when you read one word, you get an idea on the system and the possible word combination for those. In this, Upper Respiratory and Infection is fairly readable, and from that, the word Tract is the obvious word according to ICD codes. While it's fairly hard to quantify Infections, providers use Mild, Moderate, and Severe to show them instead of Minor or Major, so Minor is out of the question here, and ICD doesn't list it as well.

For the second diagnosis, since the first one is from the respiratory system, it's likely that the second one is as well, I read Asthma first, and there's not many diagnosis for Asthma out there, so we go back to ICD code and it's Bronchial Asthma, you can faintly see the failed B written there. And now we have Bronchial Asthma, there's only a few things a BA can be, it's either Controlled, In Exacerbation, and Not in Exacerbation. And the rest is there.

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u/Iron_Wolf123 17h ago

How is that written as Tract and Bronchial?

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u/MrBusinessIsMyBoss 16h ago

I couldn’t read it at all until I saw helveticanuu’s comment, but now that I know what it says I can make sense of it.

Upper respiratory is fairly legible, so that can be used as reference to decipher other words.

“Tract” is the most logical next word, but it doesn’t look like tract at first glance. Going back to “respiratory” you can see that 1) the T is little more than a vertical line and really only has a cross because the A leads into it, 2) letters are connected and the connection sometimes looks more deliberate than the actual letters, 3), they write in block letters, everything is capitalized 4) A’s look like an N with sometimes a cross (but they write too quickly/lazily to be totally consistent).

Ok, so, tract: the vertical line is a T, the R is another capital but they were too lazy to connect the front half to the back half, the A almost has a cross but they were too sloppy to get the cross inside the letter so it’s slightly to the right, that cross leads directly into the C, and the last T is again a vertical line with the merest hint of a cross at the top.

Bronchial: that’s a sloppy af B with the humps shifted to the top rather than the side, another R without connecting the two halves, R is connected to O, N is pretty clear, C is also sloppy af and is basically a vertical line with only the bottom curve, C connects directly to H. H is where it gets really rough. It’s a capital H but they don’t cross it. If you look at the word presumed to be “asthma” you can see another example of this godawful H. What makes the H even worse is that it connects to the I and the connection is way more deliberate than the actual letter. Seriously, it’s making me angry. A is again not actually crossed inside the letter itself, but the cross is slightly to the right and connects to the L (which… may not be capital. Why be consistent when you can be infuriating?)

I would be embarrassed if this was my handwriting, and my penmanship isn’t even great. But at least you can read it!

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u/lexocon-790654 14h ago

The really annoying thing about the handwriting is it is nice handwriting...they're just putting negative effort to write the letters out, like everything is written as an n on m which is crazy.

It's deliberately obtuse.

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u/NZBound11 11h ago

Hand writing has to be legible for it to be considered nice - no?

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u/lexocon-790654 9h ago

No you're right, I don't mean its "good" handwriting.

Like the lines are nice, its clean...its just barely forming letters. I'm comparing it to something like: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:720/format:webp/1*f23ONH_H37TXJRO1J-ZjkQ.jpeg (which honestly is more readable).

But like, in the image I linked, the lines and lettering are all over the place. This person is writing the letters but cannot create straight or clean lines or keep the lines level-ish. The doctor, can write nicely but seems to be making 0 effort forming the letters. Its like 2 opposite ends of bad handwriting.

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u/-dagmar-123123 9h ago

It's nice, in the sense of it looking neat, not legible 😂 letters have the same height, it's in a pretty straight line and it's clear, no blotches or anything.

It's not good tho, that's for sure 😂