After twenty four years as a nurse, hand washing it is pretty much an automatic habit, something I do every day without thinking. Or so I thought.
I am always washing my hands. I wash them before and after I care for a patient. Before and after I eat and of course after I use the restroom. I could safely say I wash my hands at least twenty times a day. My hands are always dry, mostly due to the caustic alcohol-based hand scrubs we are provided by the hospital to use. Funny though, Administration hasn't seen fit to provide us with lotion to use.
At home I use straight Vaseline on my hands at night. If I don't, the corners of my thumbs crack and bleed. That is not a situation you want when you are using alcohol based sanitizers all day. I even have a sensor on my badge at work that tracks how many times a day I sanitize, and our manager receives a report every month of how well everyone is doing with their hand washing.
I haven't always been such a stickler for hand washing. When I was a nursing student at the community college, I took a microbiology class. As part of that class we had to do a survey of our fellow-students hand washing practices in the campus bathrooms.
After weeks of casually lurking in the ladies bathroom in the College of Health Sciences, we could report that only fifty percent of the females washed their hands after using the bathroom. Yuck. But for the guys, it was twenty percent. That's right, only one in five guys on campus washed their hands after using the bathroom. I was so grossed out after that, that I made myself a promise to be in the fifty percent of female students who wash after. And to only date guys in the top twenty percent.
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The Arboretum
Non-FictionA true story of the insane thing that happened to me when I stepped out of my comfort zone and signed up for an adult ed class at a local arboretum.
