Okay...it must be Traumatic BRAIN injury. I have worked in medicine for years, but seeing an acronym out of context (for me) occasionally throws me.
When I was a student years ago, we were huddled around our teacher who had just performed a brain death study on a car accident victim. We were young, and this was the first exposure to this aspect of the job many of us had. There was a young man in the other room, around our age, normal, looking to us, but..unresponsive.
The tech came out, put the films up, and we looked at them. Our teacher looked at the films, and said something like “Looks like D.E.D. to me.”
We were all new and learning new acronyms with each day, but for the life of me, couldn’t figure out “DED”
Was it Di-Encephlatic Dysfunction? How about “Dendritic something or other...”
I was lost in thought, putting together various combinations embarrassed I didn’t know what it was, when one of my fellow students asked “What is D.E.D?”
The teacher said in a flat tone...”Dead”.
We were all horrified, but I look at it now, and it seems to me that was just one more mechanism people use to cope with things.
Mercy
What can I say to that?
Sigh
God bless our troops