Stent or Stint: At the Heart of the Debate

   This first entry in my “Language Butchery” series is very near and dear to my heart, literally.

   In the summer of 2011 I failed a stress test and was sent to the hospital for further testing. As he probed my arteries in the cardiac catheter lab, the doctor found a 95% blockage in one of them, the proximal circumflex to be exact. After he did an angioplasty to remove the obstruction he inserted an expandable mesh tube in the same area to keep the artery open. That device is called a stent.

E? I? E? I? Oh!

   The doctors, nurses, and everyone else in the hospital pronounced it “st-EH-nt”. Yet, as I go among the stent-less public I find more and more people saying “st-IN-t”. A Google search of “stent or stint” brings up several results. That leads me to believe the confusion extends far beyond my circle of friends.

   With the possible exception of one who hails from the southeastern part of the United States, no patient has ever had a stint implanted in any artery.

   Anyone who uses the word stint when he’s talking about a stent, especially one who says it with an air of authority he doesn’t possess, is like nails on a chalkboard to me. I just want to smack him upside his head but I’m under doctor’s orders not to. In addition to all the other mandates he gave me about diet, exercise, and rest, he specifically wrote in bold letters, “DO NOT SMACK ANYONE UPSIDE THE HEAD.” I didn’t think he knew me that well; I’d met him just the day before. And before you think it, I did not smack him upside his head. My life was in his hands.

   Doctor’s orders against dope-slapping someone who truly deserves it provoke an existential conflict in me that tends to raise my stress to unacceptable levels. There are doctor’s orders against stress, too. No wonder I’m stressed.

   I’ve already described a stent. “Stint” is a verb meaning to be frugal or limiting, as in “Don’t stint on pronouncing stent properly.” It’s also a noun that means a period of time as in “He did his stint in the service.” As you can see, a stint has nothing to do with a device that keeps arteries open.

   For our purposes, we’ll go with the noun and offer the following to help everyone remember the difference between stent and stint: A stent in your artery will lengthen your stint on Earth.

   Please take this to heart. It will lower the stress levels of your stented friends and just might lower your chances of getting a smack upside the head.

(For more information on my experience getting the stent, please read my “Dodging a Bullet” series earlier in this blog.)

To see how a stent is implanted, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9498DF8TU4

To avoid needing a stent in the first place, check out the American Heart Association at http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/