I am a self-proclaimed crazy cat lady. My two cats are my best friends and I love them so much I actually miss them while I’m grocery shopping. Or at work. Or even on a sunny vacation! The last time I had a fuzzy craving I ran over and picked up one of them with such fervor that it took a couple minutes for me to realize I had stepped in wet, slimy, squishy barf. So then I had to choose between setting the cat down again and washing puke off my foot. It wasn’t any easy choice. Then again, I work with bodily fluids on a daily basis so my gross-o-meter wasn’t registering anything amiss.
We have a new intern at work and she has been a wonderful fresh perspective. We were joking around when she asked why someone was on the floor in the hallway. I was half way through telling her people are just quirky from the heat when it dawned on me that I am a medical professional working in a hospital and should probably be concerned. Sure enough, an older woman had parked her arse right in the middle of the hallway. She sat straight up, legs out straight in front of her, and appeared to be eating oatmeal with the grace of a ravenous one-year-old. The bowl was upside down behind her and oatmeal was in her hair, all over her face, and down the front of her pants. If my coworker hadn’t just shot me with a nerf gun I may have figured out sooner that it wasn’t actually oatmeal.
As I approached the woman, the unmistakable putrid smell of vomit finally tickled my nose hairs. It turns out that oatmeal was no in fact in her hair, on her face, and down her pants. There wasn’t even a bowl. That was just a large pile of vomit that looked like a bowl from inside my office. When I kindly asked if she needed any help she told me no and to go away. Something tells me she was a little embarrassed. Too bad it was about to get worse. The door to the elevator located about 10 feet from her opened and a boy somewhere between 6 and 9 years old decided the entire floor needed to know there was “stinky barf” everywhere. One of the doctors who works next door to me came to lend his aid and was swiftly rebuffed as fast as I had been. The sad thing is, she said she wasn’t embarrassed. She just needed go because she was supposed to be translating at a client’s medical appointment in a few minutes and didn’t have time to be sick. She then finished wiping all the vomit off herself, tried to stand up, got dizzy and collapsed backward right into the pile of vomit that I had mistook for a bowl earlier. Thankfully she then reconsidered her plans for the day and accepted our help.
For the record, it turns out she had in fact eaten oatmeal for breakfast. That seemed important to include.
Thawing the Seattle Freeze 