←  Home All superpuzzles All on this topic

ICU and You  ·  Superpuzzle Series  ·  Number 51

The school-age child

Twenty clues  ·  companion to Mind Map #34 and Aphorism #38

What these puzzles are for

The crossword is a pretext. Twenty clues is not a syllabus and nobody learns intensive care from a grid. What a puzzle does well is hold your attention on a word for a few seconds longer than a list would, and put a fact beside it while you are looking.

So the clues are deliberately mixed. Some are practice points you should already know and may not have thought about lately. Some are pieces of physiology. Some are history — a person, a case, a year — because knowing where a thing came from makes it stick. One or two are simply odd, and those are in here on purpose: curiosity is the thing that makes the rest of it go in.

Several clues teach rather than test: you will see the answer immediately and learn something getting there. That is the intention, not a failure of construction.

There is a printable version if you would rather do it on paper, and a challenge at the foot of the page.

Twenty clues from the fortnight. One is a dead Edwardian physician, one is a boy who never grew up, one is a dog, and one is an admission almost nobody makes out loud.

10
2
6
3
4
7
15
13
17
14
16
20
11
12
9
5
19
8
1
18
0 of 134 squares filled

On a phone, scroll the grid sideways. Arrow keys move; typing a letter moves you on; backspace steps back.

Printable version  →

Across

  • 1Elastic vertebral column, inelastic spinal cord — and an acronym the MRI has now made half-obsolete
  • 8A tear in this structure can result in necrotic gut two days later, with no peritonism, no free air and a normal CT
  • 10The sedative that leaves them rousable
  • 11This sign points to heart failure in the child who has been mislabelled as having gastroenteritis
  • 14Beats the nebuliser in all but the sickest, and nobody believes it
  • 15The child's agreement, which carries no legal weight but is worth having anyway — and is worthless if their refusal changes nothing
  • 17Borrowed from adult trauma trials and given early to bleeding children, while the trial that would settle it is still recruiting as of 2026
  • 18Needs about five grams of desaturated haemoglobin before you can see it, which is why anaemic children do not show it
  • 19Father of British paediatrics, gave his name to an arthritis, and in 1902 described children many now read as the first account of inattention
  • 20What the liver produces from free fatty acids when the insulin to glucagon ratio is low

Down

  • 2Two bags now, not three — same total, same twenty hours, far fewer reactions
  • 3The gap that opens in ketoacidosis, and closes as you treat it
  • 4This Peter never grew up, and has been paying for children who do, at a famous hospital in London
  • 5Idiopathic avascular necrosis of the femoral head in a boy of four to eight, who will very often complain about his knee
  • 6Useless unless somebody applied it an hour ago, which is why so many children get the needle without it
  • 7Our real difficulty as adult intensivists looking after children, and the one we do not name
  • 9The kind of glucose monitoring that now arrives at the bedside already attached to the child
  • 12A child dry for years starts wetting the bed again, and it is often the first thing anybody notices about their new type 1 diabetes
  • 13Rises on adrenaline without anything getting worse, and misleads people every shift
  • 16Whose dog usually bites the child, contrary to everything the parents expected

Send your answers

Finish it, or get as far as you get — partial sets are welcome and are how I find out which clue was unfair.

Send your answers

The button opens a reply straight to me with your grid filled in. If your device blocks it, write to icuandyou@icloud.com instead.