Oh my god, it's full of wax

So the med student had been off to assess this 1 year old, who was fine, and I'd gone in afterwards to check him out.  All was ok, but the kid certainly did have waxy ears (the patient, not the student).  No biggie.  The main task is to dissuade the parents from trying to prise/scrape/plunge/burn the wax out in future.

And as usual, I got the med student to do the write-up which I then counter-signed.  But, as always, I like to read what I'm actually signing, and when I got to one particular sentence I did a double-take:
"Unable to visualize tympanic membrane due to excess ceruleum"

From the context, waxy ears, but what the hell is ceruleum?  I'm 99% certain he meant to write "cerumen".  So I show it to my colleague Dr Rmo, and we have a good old chuckle about it.  Then it occurs to us that ceruleum might be a real thing rather than a typo, so we google it.  And it turns out that:

"Ceruleum is an energy source in Final Fantasy XIV. Ceruleum is a refined form of Aether, obtained by draining elemental Crystals of their energy, usually in processing factories. It is a powerful yet highly unstable source of energy, mainly used by Garlean Empire to power Magitek engines."

At which point we basically pissed our pants laughing. 

But honestly, it's not the first time this kind of thing has happened.  I remember when I was an intern on nights, trying over and over to get a nasogastric tube down into an elderly lady with a bowel obstruction.  Eventually I sent her for a lateral neck x-ray and, sure enough, she had a retro-pharyngeal deposit of dilithium which was almost blocking her oesophagus.

Then there was the guy whose prostate was jam-packed full of unobtanium, preventing me from forcing a urinary catheter through.  I would tell you about the young woman and her vibranium but that might be sailing too close to the wind.  Suffice it to say that a day without an orifice filled with imaginary power sources is like a day without sunshine.

What's in a name?

One of my pet peeves is the stupid names that authors choose when they are writing junky pulp sci-fi.  Junky pulp sci-fi being what it is, you may not think that there's much of an improvement to be made simply by having better names.  But the problem is that authors seem to compensate for their lack of originality and vision by loading as many weird consonants and punctuation into their characters' names as they can in order to make them seem exotic.  Which is fine, but when you're incapable of reading without moving your lips, like me, it's really tiring to have stories full of names like "Krikk'k'thlan'aaknth" and "Xoxothogg".

The opposite end of the spectrum is equally bad.  It's deflating to read of the adventures on alien worlds of Space Captain Trevor and his intrepid sidekick Brett.  A little novelty is necessary, just not too much.

So here, for your edification, I present a foolproof method for coming up with names for junky pulp sci-fi characters, using only a list of medical abbreviations and your native wits!

First, to answer your obvious question, where can you find a list of medical abbreviations?  It's simple - just enroll in a medical degree and keep a list in a notebook of all the abbreviations that people use from day to day.  But if you're too busy, here's a sample list that I'll use for examples in this blob:
MRSA, VRE, LNMP, MCHC, NKDA, all drawn from this site that happened to be thrown up by google in response to my query and that I take no responsibility for in accordance with my Iron-Clad Disclaimer(tm).

See how there are some funny letters in there for flavour?  But not so many as to induce reader fatigue?

Now all you have to do is choose your favourite vowel (you do have a favourite vowel don't you?) and put enough copies of that vowel into the abbreviation as to make it pronounceable word.  You should try to use the same vowel all the time, as that will substitute for some kind of "cultural feel", unifying all these weird names.

My current favourite vowel is O, so now our sample list of names is:
Morsa, Vore, Olnomp, Mochoc, Nokda.
Clearly this method, while foolproof, is not infallible.  Mochoc is not such a great name, but you could amend it to Chomoc. 

Using other vowels gives a different flavour, and you could, for example, use O for the people of Terra, slaving under the alien yoke of the other people whose names have I's in them:
Mirsa, Vire, Linimp, Imchic, Inkida.

So all you junky pulp sci-fi authors out there - sin no more!  Go forth and use PTR's Ingenious Exotic Name Generator To Be Used For The Generation Of Exotic Names freely and without restraint.