I was just trapped into spending a meal seated beside a woman who smelled worse than the filthiest bathroom I’ve even been in.
Worse than an unchanged litterbox in a house with six tom cats.
Worse than the underpass near a football stadium three days after a game in the depths of an August heatwave.
She was fat and greasy and her hair hung in those stuck-together-worms that mean it hasn’t been washed in long enough for maggots to have taken up residence. A steady reek of unwashed flesh and way too much sickly sweet perfume formed a four foot radius pit’o’hell around her, more than enough to destroy any appetite I had. But the killer was that whenever she shifted in her seat these waves of rancid urine stench wafted from her. No kidding, I expected to see them, little wavy scent lines like they use in comic strips. I almost vomited when the first wave hit me.
Some homeless mental patient? Nope. My nice middle class hostess’s mother, who lives with her full time. I was aghast. Okay, clearly the mother is incontinent and has memory problems and so probably needs help & reminding about grooming – so why the hell didn’t the hostess take care of that?? Help your mother bathe, get some home help nurse in to help her, whatever. Tell her when she needs to change her pads or clothes. If she refuses, well, at the very least don’t sit her beside unsuspecting guests crowded around a table and expect them to ‘enjoy your hospitality’.
I couldn’t manage to sit beside her the entire meal. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t possibly eat anything, it was that I was continually fighting the urge to upchuck each time this woman moved again. I finally fled the table, and then told the hostess that I feared I was coming down with something and had to leave AT ONCE.
I kept the window open the whole way home, almost hanging my head out like a dog. It’s almost three hours, and a shower using all my most potently scented toiletries, later and I still feel like my lungs are contaminated with that reek.
<shudder>
Okay, the reason I’m posting this is that this is not a totally new unpleasant experience for me. I have suffered similar though much lesser assaults on my nose before.
The problem is that they keep making those blasted incontinent pads more absorbent.
People, once urine is outside your body it is exposed to air. I don’t know exactly what happens, whether it’s a chemical reaction or bacteria start growing or what, but as time passes the urine develops an unholy reek.
It doesn’t matter if the pad isn’t ‘completely saturated’ – it’s the time since it first got wet that counts! If you’re a slow ‘dribbler,’ maybe one pad would ‘hold’ it all from first thing in the morning until your bedtime – BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN USE ONE PAD ALL DAY!
I guess you can’t smell it yourself, maybe the smell is so constant that your nose has stopped sensing it, but that ISN’T true of the people around you.
So change the damn pad every few hours, okay? If it bothers you to ‘waste’ that extra absorbency, well, change to using a smaller pad or something.
Think about it. Do you REALLY want to tell everyone you meet that you’re incontinent?? You might as well – that reek that surrounds you announces it loud and clear.
Speaking only for myself…if I ever become totally incontinent, just shoot me and get it over with.