My girlfriend is a urologist, and sometimes the medical stories told at the dinner table totally ruin my appetite. Not so long ago, she introduced me to the magical world of navel stones.
[Yes, navel stones.
These stones consist of sebum (a waxy oil produced by sebaceous glands) and keratin, typically when a patient didn’t wash her or his navel for too long a time.
Some patients are not physically nor psychologically fit anymore to decently wash up, and then the mysteries of navel stones and hair shit balls (down there) enter the medical file (and let’s not even start about the shit balls — I didn’t eat for a week).
So what do you do ?
The thing is that bad personal hygiene is a basic ingredient of the visiting patient, so navel-stone men and shit-ball women are part of regular hospital life. You and I may wash up before consulting an MD, but patients who live in the margins of life sometimes don’t.
But they still need help.
My girlfriend has often cleaned up patients in the most terrible unhygienic states, removing navel stones, shit balls, and what have you, and giving the patient a complete wash-up, before a procedure could even begin.
To add insult to injury, I must say that her sense of smell has turned pretty bad over the years, and she basically has no problem anymore with eating spoiled cheese, or meat that is overdue.
I guess that once you enter the world of navel stones, there’s no way back.
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SOURCES: the footnoted site.
Footnotes
