I Don't Want to Catch a Cold
Wed., March 12, 09:22 AM
This post isn’t about Husband, but he does help to illustrate the point. I was filling out yet one more medical questionnaire, when I came to, “Does the patient have hygiene issues? Please explain.” I was tempted to answer that I could not explain in just one line, and then I had it: “He doesn’t believe in germs.” (He doesn’t believe in anything he can’t see… except for aliens and UFO’s.)
Where does my own knowledge come from? From my mother, for starters, with simple rules of what was or was not sanitary. But I happily studied microbiology forty-five years ago. There have been advances in the field, of course, but most of what we learned then is still valid. Warnings from our professors have come to pass as well, and I have always been glad that I resisted the attempts of doctors to prescribe antibiotics for every little sniffle — for the children as well as for myself.
When Husband was hospitalized last summer, we were informed that he had tested positive for a variety of Staphylococcus aureus that is resistant to antibiotics. I hesitate to call it a MRSA because it was not making him sick. They only needed to tell us because they wanted our help to avoid spreading it to the other patients; we were asked to wear gowns while visiting him and wash our hands before leaving.
I am familiar with S. aureus and recalled what I had learned:
- S. aureus is the one that causes yellow pus and is more virulent than some other species.
- Staph germs of one type or another are prevalent all over.
- Most of us are fairly comfortable with our own germs, but susceptible to infections from other people.
- If Husband had this particular S. aureus, the whole family probably had it too. It didn’t make us sick either, but we did need to remember to wash our hands before going to other areas of the hospital.
- And one more thing, soap and water does a pretty good job of killing the organisms on your hands.
Aside from following instructions and discouraging any visitors who might be more vulnerable to infection, I pretty well ignored that situation. The man was very sick from other causes, after all; why dwell on a germ that wasn’t bothering him? On the other hand, as I was scheduled for my own surgery the following week, I kept away from the hospital that last week before Son brought him home.
Did you ever think about the difference between sanitary and sterile? Sterile means no germs; it means that chemical and physical methods (like heat) have been used to kill them all. Sanitary implies aesthetically clean. For example, you could clean the floor in the bathroom really well, using bleach and similar chemicals; but would you want to eat off it? For most people the answer is no; it may be clean, it may be sterile, but it really isn’t sanitary.
Mothers of small children as well as schoolteachers know how kids share their germs — with everyone. But did you know that those colds that never seem to end are most often the result of re-infecting ourselves? We all touch our faces, and we do that a lot. We touch objects that have been touched either by ourselves or by someone else, and then we touch our faces again. You’ve picked up a pencil that some little kid was using and, without thinking, you touch your face with it. You handle a doorknob, and then you put your hand to your face, perhaps trying to stifle a sneeze. The result is that, not only have you re-infected yourself, but you have probably started a new chain…
I developed some regular practices in the office, and I think they helped a lot. Maybe I would have been okay anyhow. I don’t catch cold very often, but I remember class experiments in which we inoculated plates with our personal swabbings. I never could produce much, while my classmates had these huge growths of brightly colored whatevers.
Anyhow, I always kept a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the office. (In case you’re interested, 70 percent is the most effective germicide, even more than 100 percent.) I wiped doorknobs and telephones and light switches. I cleaned the fax and the copier. Not only was I protecting myself, I wanted to keep all the others healthy. What would I do if my computer people were too sick to fix my machine?
Sometimes this kind of action is the only one you can take. It is very difficult to teach little kids that they should wash their hands. It is even harder to teach big, grown-up boys that hand-washing isn’t somehow effeminate. Heaven knows, I can’t fix the world, but I can try to keep my little corner of it germ-free. Just mine, you understand; across the hall is the room of the man who leaves used tissues around and sticks his hand in the garbage can…
