My story:
I'm a healthcare worker who sometimes goes shopping for my patients (in this case a man in a wheelchair living in a retirement home -- not a nursing home). On this occasion I was getting three items for three reasons:
1. Hand lotion, because we nursing types who wash our hands 100 times a day end up with very dry skin. That one was more for the visiting caregivers like me than for him.
2. Jumbo back of extra soft, 3-ply toilet paper. The retirement home provides him TP, but it's the cheapest, gas-station quality, transparent crap paper they could buy in bulk! $3000/m they pay to live there; you think they'd give them nice TP, especially old folks with dry skin and at risk for bed sores. So yeah, bought him the good stuff.
3. Red rubber hot water bottle. He has poor circulation and his feet get cold at night in bed. He'd been using an electric heating pad but the home's bureaucrats decided arbitrarily and without doing any research that it was a "fire hazard" and they'd put him out on the street if he kept using it. So, I thought back to what my mother used to put in my bed when I was sick and chilly as a child. Old red rubber hot water bottle filled with boiled water; the low-tech solution.
I hadn't seen one of these things in over three decades. I was honestly surprised to find it in Wal-Mart; electric pads are so much better and easier. While waiting in the checkout line, I noticed the bag this R.H.W.B. comes in has a lot of other things in it. Hoses and nozzles and attachments. How odd... So I read the back of the packaging, with includes a number of directions for use. Suddenly it dawned on me what people these days USUALLY are using these things for: Giving themselves home douches and enemas! Would never have guessed that one in a million years! I chuckled to myself about that for a minute.
Then it was my turn at the cash register, I looked up and met the cashier's eyes.
...and realized that the only things in my a cart are, and what they might suggest about my plans for the evening if taken all together:
1. An enema kit.
2. Big bottle of lotion.
3. HUGE package of extra-soft TP.
I'm a healthcare worker who sometimes goes shopping for my patients (in this case a man in a wheelchair living in a retirement home -- not a nursing home). On this occasion I was getting three items for three reasons:
1. Hand lotion, because we nursing types who wash our hands 100 times a day end up with very dry skin. That one was more for the visiting caregivers like me than for him.
2. Jumbo back of extra soft, 3-ply toilet paper. The retirement home provides him TP, but it's the cheapest, gas-station quality, transparent crap paper they could buy in bulk! $3000/m they pay to live there; you think they'd give them nice TP, especially old folks with dry skin and at risk for bed sores. So yeah, bought him the good stuff.
3. Red rubber hot water bottle. He has poor circulation and his feet get cold at night in bed. He'd been using an electric heating pad but the home's bureaucrats decided arbitrarily and without doing any research that it was a "fire hazard" and they'd put him out on the street if he kept using it. So, I thought back to what my mother used to put in my bed when I was sick and chilly as a child. Old red rubber hot water bottle filled with boiled water; the low-tech solution.
I hadn't seen one of these things in over three decades. I was honestly surprised to find it in Wal-Mart; electric pads are so much better and easier. While waiting in the checkout line, I noticed the bag this R.H.W.B. comes in has a lot of other things in it. Hoses and nozzles and attachments. How odd... So I read the back of the packaging, with includes a number of directions for use. Suddenly it dawned on me what people these days USUALLY are using these things for: Giving themselves home douches and enemas! Would never have guessed that one in a million years! I chuckled to myself about that for a minute.
Then it was my turn at the cash register, I looked up and met the cashier's eyes.
...and realized that the only things in my a cart are, and what they might suggest about my plans for the evening if taken all together:
1. An enema kit.
2. Big bottle of lotion.
3. HUGE package of extra-soft TP.
I haven't turned that red since I was a teenager!