This column originally appeared in 2013. C.J. is on vacation with limited WiFi.
“You must be a doctor, the way you goin’ after those hands,” a man said to me in the men’s room. The only comfort I could take in his observation is that he was waiting to get to the sink; this does not happen much in men’s rooms, and if the can is in a bar, it is exceedingly rare.
A friend of mine once made the sardonic observation that I was (air quotes) a hand washer. Another friend, when I visit her, asks me if I have washed my hands; I watch her wash her fingertips. I wash my hands completely, from fingertips to wrist. This may account for the fact that I am not often afflicted, affected and infected by the sniffles, snuffles and snots.
When my stomach exploded and sent me into the hospital, the doctor told me it was the result of Helicobacter pylori bacteria in my gut. He also said that the medical field is not entirely certain how we over washed westerners get H. pylori; it is more common in countries where sanitation is dicey. (I might have gotten it on that float trip, that one time; spent a lot of time under the float.)
I worked for years in an advertising department that ran on its stomach. “Anybody bring doughnuts?” was the daily inquiry. Our tradition of having pitch-in breakfasts to celebrate birthdays made the calendar the most well researched vehicle in a department full of readers. (The month of March was the richest in births and breakfasts; there was a lot of summer lovin’ on those summer nights.) We would first gather in the conference room to view the spread, and then head for the sinks to wash up. Someone once noted that “(we) better get in front of CJ or we’ll be bottled up for days.” Unfunny comedians. It was known in the department, however, who the “non hand washers” were. One man and one woman stood out from the crowd as two you did not want to see picking through the long johns and jelly-filled. The woman’s contributions to pitch-ins usually went untouched, back to her home.
I was not always as attendant to my hand hygiene as I am now. I used to brag that I could not get sick because I had loaded my body with all the germs I could find, and built up immunities to them all. I read something in a head-busting scholarly tome that a specific number of cold viruses had been identified. The supposition was that if a baby were exposed to all of them at an early age, she would be immune for all her life. Who’s first? Maybe not. But it has become evident that we in this country are so over-sanitized that we have not developed defense systems for minor ills. We slap antibiotics into our heads for the most minor of twinges; now those twinges have grown big enough to eat us, and the drugs we throw at them. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureus) infections are caused by “a strain of staph bacteria that has become resistant to the antibiotics commonly used to treat ordinary staph infections.” We’ve created a monster.
We are entering the time of greater contact with the world and people outside of our bodies: shopping season. I am not pooh-poohing the little sanitizing wipes available at your local grocery to be used to wipe down the cart handle, but there is both risk and reward in some exposure to the cooties of others.
In the meantime, I’ll be at the sink, going through my hand jive.
cjon3acd@att.net