"To make matters worse, I've had a dose of the trots for yonks. I feel really knackered, like I could kick the bucket at any time."
Perhaps such an exchange would be more extreme than most, but the use of slang, possibly incomprehensible to doctors coming to practise in New Zealand, has meant a list of colloquialisms is regularly included in Cole's Medical Practice in New Zealand.
Editor of the guide, published by the Medical Council of New Zealand, is Wellington GP Dr Ian St George, who said the section headed "Take our word for it: NZ slang expressions" was first included in the guide in 2008.
The guide, first published in 1988 and now in its 10th edition, is issued to all doctors registered to practise in New Zealand to introduce new entrants to New Zealand to the main legislative and ethical standards and guidelines.
Dr St George said it had been suggested that the several pages of colloquial expressions should be included because many of the overseas doctors had difficulty understanding what patients were talking about.
Overseas doctors are required to pass examinations testing their academic understanding of English, but this did not cover slang they might encounter in their medical practice.
The terms in the book also come with a warning - "don't try these at home; many of these words and expressions are considered vulgar, rude or offensive: do not use them until you are sure you will not offend".
To add to the confusion, some terms such as "hottie" have more than one meaning (a hot water bottle and a sexually attractive man or woman).
And some conditions have several colloquial descriptions, such as those for drunkenness (off your face, pissed, plastered) and vomiting (chundering, spewing).
Dr St George said the term "crook", meaning feeling sick, was one which commonly appeared to cause confusion.
Equally baffling was the answer "I'm just a box of birds" to the question about how the patient was feeling.
Such things were scattered "willy-nilly "through New Zealanders' conversation and it was hard to know what to include.
Staff at the medical council gave him feedback on new expressions, but "I really should have a focus group of teenagers".
This would ensure he could keep up to date with new additions to the language, such as "the latest word for condom" which had probably "changed since last year".
The material used was gleaned from several websites on New Zealand colloquialisms, he said.
In his own practice, he could also get "drawn up short" by malapropisms or mispronunciations from time to time - people saying they were "bronical" for instance, when they meant they were having bronchial problems.
Some colourful expressions were also of a certain era. He recalled his former father-in-law, a Central Otago runholder, referring to something being as "ugly as a hawk in an onion bag".
You would have to be a "bloke of a certain age to know what an onion bag was".
Another expression not heard often now was someone being "all over the place like a mad woman's footprints".
The book, which is also distributed to all medical students and regarded as a useful general guide to New Zealand's health system, can also be downloaded from the medical council site by the public.
