Last week at the hospital where I work, I looked out the window and was excited to see that a helicopter was landing on the pad, only three dozen feet from where I stood. As I had just finished drawing blood from a patient, I walked down the hall on the way back to the lab. Naturally the double doors at the end of the hallway were opened to let the patient and his stretcher through, and a burst of cool, fresh, outside air flowed down the hall (it is a substance almost never found in a hospital despite its therapeutic qualities). One of the nurses, a big Russian woman, said, “Ahh that feels goooot.” I and a nearby nursing assistant voiced our agreement (no doubt as pleasant and wistful associations filled our minds).
But a few seconds later, due to the sudden disturbance in pressure in the corridor, the shifting air currents brought the unmistakable odor of stool to our noses. And not just stool, but the stool of sick people, the miasma of which was whipped up and spread about by the moving air. Nobody pointed out this last sensation except through our silence. It brought me back to where I was, and I regained the presence of mind to send the tubes of blood down the lab.
As I rode the elevator back down to my station, I thought about how glad I was for that brief refreshing wind (my only gulp of outside air for eight and a half hours), even if it was followed by the smell of poop.
pseudoisaac 