The woman who smelled of wee…

She stinks, what do I do now?

 

So yesterday we arrive at Christies hospital to visit my dad and as we turn the corner into the Medical Assessment Ward, we’re hit in the face with a smell. I worked in a nursing home for long enough to know that smell when I find it – it’s wee. And since all the patients on this ward are mobile to some degree or another, it must have come in on a person. I’m praying that it’s on someone on the other side of the ward.

Which turns out to be a futile waste of energy.

When we get to my dad’s bed, the man in the next bed isn’t there. We sit and chat for a bit and then we see him approaching, accompanied by a woman who I think is his mother, she’s a reasonably turned out woman, make up on, clean hair, clean looking clothes. As she passes by to get to the bed next to my dad I notice something odd.

I’ve gone cross eyed and I can’t breathe. The smell of ammonia wafting off this woman has sucked all the air out of the room. I look around, my mum is trying really hard, it has to be said without much success, not to laugh at my expression. The girl visiting the man across the way has gone white. There’s a nurse staring at the woman in appalled fascination. SHE SMELLS OF WEE and it’s horrific.

Once she’s sat down things inprove because you only get an ammonia backdraft when she moves. We carry on making conversation and I carry on getting told off because I keep muttering about stinky women and the need for showers which mum thinks is indiscreet. How is is she is classing it as socially unacceptable to mutter about someone but not socially unacceptable to wander round a ward full of sick people smelling like the gents urinals at a third division football match after half-time? And then the woman gets out a can of deoderant.

Hurrah, I think.

No. She sprays the tiniest, stingiest amount of this stuff onto her neck. Tiny amount. Barely even pressed the spray top down. Don’t stint on it love, SPRAY DAMN YOU!! Spray until the air is white and we can all breathe again. Don’t stop spraying until the can is empty. I’d rather go out in a cloud of Sure for Women than the pungent aroma of a pig farm.

She was still there when we left, sitting happily in her green cloud of stench, a cloud so foul that even flies didn’t dare approach for fear of asphyxiation. All the way home I was paranoid that the smell had wafted to our bay and I now smelled of wee. Even though I’d had a long shower before going to the hospital, I had another one when I got home just on case. This evening I shall be taking a bottle of super strength deoderant and if she’s there then social niceties be damned, for the health of all patients, staff and visitors on that ward, the stinky witch is getting doused.