Monday, October 12, 2009

A hygiene vigilante in emergency.

FYI. The Hygiene Hunter is not the best person to have at your side in a medical emergency. Stress causes me to say insensitive things like, "I can appreciate you're injured, but could you wait to bleed until we arrive at the hospital?" and "Uh, excuse me? Please wipe that up before you exit my vehicle." On top of that, I levitate in hospitals -- for obvious reasons. And, when I levitate, the attention is drawn away from the truly sick.

I was the only person available to deal with a family emergency this past Friday. As the saying goes, when God closes a door, he opens a window. While my son was in X-ray, I met Marlene. She was making a big fuss in the waiting area. A hospital staff member was nodding her head politely in response to Marlene's directives and then began clearing reading material from a table. I asked Marlene what transpired. She told me the woman who had been sitting there (points with her hand) was sneezing and coughing all over the magazines and newspapers. "It was disgusting! You should have seen her! Wiping her nose this way and that way and then touching the magazines!" Marlene wanted to protect others from the woman's obliviousness. When a man with a mask sat down in the very chair occupied by the woman, Marlene whipped out her hand sani and went over to sanitize the armrests of the chair. They say, one of the best places to get sick is in a hospital.

I asked Marlene if she's always carried hand sani with her. "Just started to this year," she said. Then she shared her home remedies with me. Which I'll share with you in an upcoming post. 

5 comments:

  1. It seems to me that more people are using hand sani. And more people are aware of their coughs and sneezes and where they touch afterwards.

    I had a meeting with a financial advisor at school today. She was helping me with calculations when all of a sudden she whipped out hand sani. "I just coughed on my hand," she told me. I wasn't even aware of the cough. This woman's reaction time was a split second.
    I told her the Hygiene Hunter would be pleased!

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  2. Hospitals should enforce a BYORM (bring your own reading material) policy. I don't want to catch anything that isn't necessary in a hospital and I especially don't want to catch anything while reading 'Legacy'. Now I'm stuck deciding which is worse: hospital or bathroom magazines because I think bathroom magazines could have a post of their own.

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  3. "Flu Worries Pump Up Sales of Hand Sanitizer", NPR news article:

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113799183

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  4. "But can you over-sanitize your kids?"

    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113058233&ps=rs

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  5. I think most people just scratch and pick at themselves without even thinking. This week I saw a well dressed guy scratch his buttocks them pop a few grapes into his mouth.

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