Blowing Around The Internet And Getting A Dirty Mind--

I was blowing around the Internet like a puff ball on the loose and I came across this little news item. It amused me and made me think some thoughts, so I cut and pasted it into my "amusing and thought provoking pile" and here I am on a rainy Saturday morning pulling it out and slapping it down.

The article itself describes an unusual proceeding where the medical tribunal saves society from one of its lecherous participants.


"""LONDON: A British dentist has been found guilty of urinating in his surgery sink and using dental tools meant for patients to clean his fingernails and ears.
A medical tribunal said it was satisfied the evidence showed 51-year-old Alan Hutchinson, who routinely did not wear gloves or wash his hands, had risked the health of "himself, staff and patients" for more than 28 years.
A dental nurse who worked for Hutchinson for 16 years said she had caught him urinating in the sink more than once.
"He was tucking something into his trousers before zipping them up hastily. I walked over and I was behind him. He moved to the left and I could smell urine," the nurse told the tribunal.
The tribunal determined that the dentist's poor hygiene habits made him unfit to practice and struck him off the dental register, banning him from work.
"You urinated into a sink in your surgery following which you did not wash your hands and then proceeded to treat a patient. This behavior was clearly inappropriate and is completely unacceptable," the tribunal chairman said. ***


Now first let me make it perfectly clear. I've been peeing in sinks at work for twenty some odd years.

Yep.

I even know how to set the urine swirling so it doesn't splatter back on out of the sink. The trick is all in understanding the curvature of the bowl and visualizing those roller skaters and skate boarders who can carve up high on the rim without spilling out...

What's that you say? I'm gross?

Peeing in a sink is gross?

Hmmmm. Funny. I never saw it that way. Urine is sterile. The sink plumbing is in the same system as the toilet plumbing. In construction, sometimes the toilet is sitting outside on the driveway, and a plug has been inserted into the hole in the floor to keep sewer gases from coming to harm you. Sewer gases are gross, I'll agree with you there. You need to pee. You need access to plumbing. The sink provides it...

So all this makes me laugh at the reaction to the dentist peeing in his sink. Sure it SOUNDS horrific. Sure it SOUNDS HORRIBLE. But in reality?

I remember being in my late teens and talking with my Mum about her job at the hospital. She had been assigned the task of writing up sort of a germ containment report (the terms she used escape me) and this got us talking about germs in general.

She always told me that hospitals were no place to be if you were sick, because they were full of sick people. This made sense. We talked about antibiotic hand washes and soaps and stuff like that, and got into discussions about the immune system which led me to make the brass proclamation that humans would start to see unkillable germs someday, and that people would lose their ability to fight off simple germs because their immune systems were so protected, they atrophied.

Whoot?

Turns out, I was right.

Up here in the Northwest, there are infections that may start as a pimple and lead to weeks on an IV antibiotic drip. Little buggers who've developed resistances to almost everything we humans have learned to throw at them. Evil little flesh eating hooligans who get inside of innocent and often hyper-clean people and turn their silky skin into a roiling sea. Doctor's and hospitals have patients who have sores that will never heal. Their bodies are simply testing grounds and breeding grounds for these little invaders. The whole scenario is reminiscent of some good sci-fi book or film, and yet, the scary stories are real.

Which leads me back to this peeing dentist, and from there to an ever expanding circle of thoughts.

As a society, do we over-regulate everything? Are our good-intentions backfiring on ourselves? When you protect your child from germs, are you actually opening up your child to much more dire germ susceptibility?

When you protect your children from the evil side of life, are you setting them up as naked innocents, and tossing them to the lurid?

In my line of work, I can expect to be bleeding by lunch time. The knuckles and fingers and the backs of my hands get it the most.

I don't wash out my cuts. I don't apply neosporine. If the blood is going to get on what I am doing, I slap some TP and duct tape over the wound to keep blood out of raw wood.

I've never had an infection in my hands last more than one afternoon. Ever. My body knows to leave white blood cells and T-cells napping in my fingertips, ready for the next days' assault. My body has become an efficient antibiotic by necessity. By not wiping down the handle of every shopping cart I touch, I don't have to worry about touching shopping carts.

So on one level, I am thinking aloud about germs. On another level, I am thinking aloud about society's progression towards over-protection in all of its manifestations.

The thoughts keep multiplying and dividing and are leading to a roiling sea. That's all I got for today.

I have to go pee...