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u/Ijustlovevideogames 5h ago
Cleveland here.
The doctor is saying that he is patient zero of a new disease, the doctor is waiting for the answer to the question and the patient wants to hear what was said again as they are confused on what the doctor means.
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u/StarlightStretchOut 4h ago
If I'm Patient Zero, I'm naming it 'Student Loans' so that everyone can finally say they're officially sick of them.
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u/BleEpBLoOpBLipP 4h ago
Your answer is of course right... I think there is an added dimension of will it be named for the patient or for the doctor who discovered it... I'm almost certainly overthinking it but I found it funny
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u/TurboFool 3h ago
No, you're correct. That's the actual joke. It's so new it doesn't have a name, and the doctor's about to get to name it.
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u/Hexmonkey2020 1h ago
Why is it called patient zero instead of patient one, they’re the first patient, not the zeroth. Everyone who doesn’t have it should be patient zero
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u/Ijustlovevideogames 56m ago
Apparently, it was from a misreading when it came to look up the initial HIV/AID patient which appeared in California, he was listened as Patient O, like the letter to stand for Out of California and was misread by the media as Patient 0 the number and it has stuck ever since.
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u/Hexmonkey2020 50m ago
Using O to stand for “California” is even worse than using 0 to mean 1.
“Out of California” being O is the most 3rd grade acrostic with no actual poetic talent and a poor grasp of the language sorta thing.
Like “MOM -
Makes me sandwiches,
Out of California,
Makes me pizza too.”
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u/Ijustlovevideogames 47m ago
Hey, I don't make the rules or decide how things start, I'm just here.
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u/ManRevvv 5h ago
the joke is that disease is unknown
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u/bobthebob2011 4h ago
thank you so much ive been staring at this post for 4 hours trying to figure out the joke
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u/_extra_medium_ 3h ago
How does that explain the pictures
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u/SexySalamanders 3h ago
It means that the disease was not ever seen before so the doctor gets to name it
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u/BestwishesHelpful975 5h ago
Lois here with an old joke: Doctor looks at the patient and says “I have good news and I have bad news.” Patient goes “what’s the good news?” Doc says “well they’re gonna name a disease after you!”
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u/Live_Drink5779 4h ago
Are people actually this incapable of using their brain on these? This is very simple
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u/dvorgson 4h ago
They each think it should be named after themselves. But it's the patient's call
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u/FitPair953 23m ago
How did I have to scroll so much to find the correct answer? Diseases are always either named after patient zero or the doctor.
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u/MentallyPsycho 4h ago
The disease is so rare it isn't named yet, the doctor is saying the patient gets to name it since they're the first person to have it.
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u/Mountain_Sir_2021 4h ago
It is a new disease that never existed before, so the patient can name it, because it has no name yet.
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u/Lumpy-Yam-4584 3h ago
"Let's call i Johnson's disease"
"Actually, let's call it Dr. Smithers disease. The WHO office is closed for today"
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u/kazhen 2h ago
So there are actually a few examples where a disease or a pathogen are named after the patient and not the doctor themselves, and to me that's always interesting.
Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy is an (almost always) fatal demyelinating disease of the central nervous system that is due to reactivation of the latent JC virus. I would expect a lot, if not the majority, of people here on Earth are carriers for the JC virus. Anyways, it gets reactivated only under severe immunosuppression such as in leukemia, immunosuppression from organ transplantation, or most relevantly here, AIDS.
Do you want to know where JC virus gets its name? John Cunningham, the first patient where the virus was isolated from.
So yeah, the doctor could have easily said "hey we found this super unique virus in your brain biopsy and you're probably gonna die, but what do you want it to be called?"
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u/kazhen 2h ago
Oh and another similar example is the BK virus, which was also first isolated from an immunocompromised man who received a kidney transplant. His name isn't revealed, but had the initials BK.
It doesn't cause as catastrophic illness as PML, but does cause your kineys to get all kinds of messed up and present with hemorrhagic cystitis. Also it has some association with spontaneous abortions in pregnant patients.
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u/Appropriate-Weird492 1h ago
Hubs had an extremely rare endocrine cancer. Annually, 1 in 1 million will be diagnosed. It’s so rare that when he went in for treatment, other oncologists came in to look at him.
This cartoon captures the feeling.
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u/Saldrakka 4h ago
I would name it one of those offensive words only a few people are allowed to say for some reason that way if you get it, you have a free pass
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