The Art of Bathing
Taking a bath. It’s a simple luxury that most women love, and many take for granted. I know I used to.
That was before I moved into this house.
Now, it’s a rare treat to soak in a luxurious bubble bath with a good book, and even then the clock is always ticking and I usually don’t get past more than a paragraph or two before my time is up.
And before I can take my bath I must scrub.
The tub and floor must be scrubbed and sanitized before I even dare to take my shoes off.
I start at the door with a mop and bucket of scalding hot bleach water. I work my way into the room, scrubbing the smears of blood from the floor until the entire room smells like a public swimming pool, complete with the added aroma of urine. Once I reach the window I can open it to air out the room while I scrub the piss stains from around the base of the toilet. Last of all, I use the mop to clean the outside of the toilet before dumping the bucket into the bowl. Finally the room starts to smell clean.
After that, I turn my attention to the tub itself. It too must be bleached, but first I remove the heavy-duty shower chair and the festering green rubber germ factory that the old woman calls a bathmat. I have tried to tell her that she needs to replace the mat but she won’t listen. I repeat my scrubbing routine, using a clean rag that I have brought with me along with the rest of my bath supplies. I will throw the rag in the garbage afterward; the thought of having it share the washing machine with the rest of the laundry turns my stomach.
Scrub scrub scrub.
I clean the inside of the tub and all surrounding surfaces with a solution of more bleach than water. When I’m satisfied that it’s finally clean, I check my watch.
Fifteen minutes have already elapsed. I have another twenty minutes, thirty if I’m lucky.
Tick tick tock tick… the clock is always ticking.
As my bath fills I can finally unpack my bag of bath supplies; shampoo, conditioner, loofah, soap and razor… typical stuff that most women keep in their bathrooms. I can’t keep the stuff in this bathroom because it’s not mine. I have a bathroom downstairs but it only has a tiny shower stall. I hate showers; I’ve always loved my baths. The only bathroom in the house that has a bathtub belongs to the old woman. It’s filled with old-person stuff; bottles and bottles of prescription pills, vitamins, laxatives and antacids. My scented soaps, lavender bubble bath and pink loofah would have no place in here.
Finally my bath is ready; steamy and inviting with fluffy white mountains of lavender scented bubbles.
Mmmm!
It’s a tiny slice of heaven, even if it’s only for a short time. I ease myself into the water and dunk my head under. It’s all worth it; even if I have to spend the same amount of time scrubbing as I do bathing. It’s all I get, so I have to cherish it.
As I reach for my washcloth I notice something on the edge of the tub.
NO! Please, No! Please don’t let it be…!
On closer inspection my fears are confirmed. The small kinky grey hair could be none other than…
A PUBE!
I shudder with revulsion as I stand up and reach for a square of toilet paper so I can remove the offending hair, which undoubtedly came from the old woman.
The elderly lady with whom I must share this bathtub is the owner of the house, who hired me to cook, clean and generally help her as her health continues to fail.
I try to remember that she is a woman like me, that she was young once but my mind sometimes has trouble making the connection.
She is a human being, and her name is Mary.
Once, she was young and thin and happy.
Now, she is old, fat and dying.
Instead of the pretty dark-haired woman pictured in the old black and white photos on the mantle, I now see a mountain of overflowing diabetic flesh, weighing in at nearly four hundred pounds.
Her legs are surreal; prehistoric tree trunks with flaky, scaly bark and bulbous, swollen roots for feet. She doesn’t wear shoes unless she leaves the house because she can’t reach her feet to put them on. Her bloated ankles appear to be overflowing the feet, which are now completely numb due to advancing neuropathy. The soles of the feet are cracked open in several places and never heal because there is so little circulation at this point that the flesh is nearly dead. Small smears of blood on the floor follow her every step around the house.
She is an amputation waiting to happen and there is nothing I can do to change it.
A perpetual infection lurks beneath the surface; her doctor maintains futile hope that it will succumb to the endless barrage of powerful antibiotic pills he keeps prescribing.
But the doctor knows the truth.
Everyone knows.
Even Mary knows that it’s just a matter of time before first one foot, then the other will have to be removed to prevent the spread of gangrene. At this point it’s simply a matter of keeping the feet attached for as long as possible. If she loses her feet I will no longer be able to take care of her.
As anyone who has seen advanced Type 2 Diabetes in action knows, once the amputations start, it’s the beginning of the end. First the foot, then the lower leg, and then the thigh… Once they have removed all of the leg and part of the ass, there’s nothing left to amputate and death follows soon afterward.
The old woman must be aware of this – how can she not be? I think she’s either heavily in denial or she has simply decided to go out happy. There isn’t any other way to explain her artery-choking diet of deep-fried, pan-fried, chicken-fried, fried-fried foods. Not a scrap of healthy food passes her lips if she can help it. She averages a six-pack of ‘diet’ soda per day and never drinks water, except to swallow pills. (and sometimes not even then.) I use my grocery allowance to buy healthy foods: vegetables, whole grains, fish and chicken. Mary orders pizzas and other takeout foods. She also chooses her own ‘groceries’ and has them delivered: cookies, doughnuts, jujubes, chocolates and candies. She crams them into her mouth by the handful, followed by increasingly larger doses of insulin to combat the rush of sugar. Her body has developed such a tolerance to insulin that it barely has any effect, even at doses that would be fatal to an ordinary person. Mary is playing with fire and I am powerless to stop her.
I mentioned that I cook for her. I TRY to cook for her, but if the food isn’t fried or sugary she turns her nose up at it. I try to avoid cooking the foods she wants. Sometimes, I wait until she takes a nap, then prepare healthy, Diabetic-friendly meals. I disappear before she wakes up, leaving her to fend for herself for a while. She then must either fry something by herself or suffer through vegetables and brown rice. Sometimes it works, but not often.
Mary’s family doesn’t visit her anymore because they don’t want to be bothered with her. To them, she is a burden and an embarrassment. It’s really quite sad. She has nobody but me to rely on, and I’m failing her miserably due to her refusal to care about her own health.
The reason I must scrub and sanitize the bathroom before I use it is her feet. Those horrid, decaying, borderline gangrenous feet. Every day she soaks them in a foot bath that I prepare for her – a solution of Epsom salts, iodine and warm water – in hopes that the infection will recede and the cracks will stop spreading. It’s mostly a futile exercise at this point but it’s better than the alternative, which is to do nothing.
Yes, she should be in a hospital but she refuses to go and has made it very clear that she will fire me if I attempt to have her taken to the hospital. Losing this job might sound like a blessing in disguise but then what would happen to Mary? The hospital won’t keep her against her will, and who would take care of her?
Certainly not her relatives.
Those vultures are hanging back, waiting for her to die so they can swoop in, exterminate the vermin, (me – domestic help no longer needed) loot her possessions and sell her house. Not that I care if I’m thrown out of here after her death; it’s just repulsive, the way they think they’re entitled to anything of hers after they have shunned her and left her to die alone.
When her daily foot bath is finished, I carry the plastic tub of water to the bathroom, where I pour the toxic bacterial stew down the bathtub drain. The water is cloudy and I try not to look at it. I discard my surgical gloves, then change my clothes and wash my hands up past the elbows afterward, followed by a healthy dose of hand sanitizer.
I’m not a germophobe. What I am is well aware of the terrifying ‘super bugs’ that have been emerging in recent years; strains of once-familiar bacteria that have mutated into antibiotic-resistant and potentially deadly versions of their former selves.
I’ve seen the antibiotics Mary is taking. Powerful stuff. I can tell that her doctor is worried. God only knows what ball-busting bionic bacteria might be lurking on her skin, especially on the legs and feet where too little blood flows and the immune system and antibiotics simply can’t reach.
I’m no dummy – I know I’m bathing in the same tub where I dump that septic soup, but the alternative is to dump it in the kitchen sink, where I wash dishes and prepare food.
So I bleach. And I scrub.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me until today that I should have been dumping the foot bath down the toilet.
I raise my head out of the steaming bath. The bubbles are gone, which means my time is probably up. I check my clock.
Sure enough, time is up.
As with many elderly people, bladder weakness is an issue with Mary so the time I can safely occupy her bathroom is limited. If she happens to wake, she will make a beeline for the bathroom. If I hear her thundering down the hallway and I’m still in the tub, there will be trouble and I will have a mess to mop up on top of it.
I pull the plug and am about to stand up when I realize that I still have some conditioner in my hair. I lay back down in the water, rinsing my hair as the tub drains. I lay there for a moment longer, savoring the last bit of my sultry paradise before I have to get out and rejoin the real world.
I sit up when I notice that the water hasn’t gone down much at all. The bath is still full.
I jump out quickly and reach for my towel.
I get dressed, keeping an eye on the tub, wishing it would hurry up and drain. I don’t want to deal with a clog after getting all nice and clean and relaxed.
Once fully dressed, I can see that I must face the fact that the drain is definitely clogged. It was probably a ball of hair or something. Ick.
I grab the plunger and work it up and down a few times until finally the water begins to drain. Whatever was plugging it either worked its way down or came back up into the tub.
As the water grows shallower, I see an object floating in the bottom of the tub; most likely the thing responsible for clogging the drain… the thing that I have essentially, been bathing with ever since I pulled the plug.
As the remainder of the water disappears down the drain, I begin to gag, then rush to the toilet and spew my guts. When I finish puking, I am moving immediately, running for the bleach and wondering if there is enough hand sanitizer to cover my entire body.
I will gather up the nerve to remove the toe from the bathtub later.
Copyright © 2012 Mandy White
That was before I moved into this house.
Now, it’s a rare treat to soak in a luxurious bubble bath with a good book, and even then the clock is always ticking and I usually don’t get past more than a paragraph or two before my time is up.
And before I can take my bath I must scrub.
The tub and floor must be scrubbed and sanitized before I even dare to take my shoes off.
I start at the door with a mop and bucket of scalding hot bleach water. I work my way into the room, scrubbing the smears of blood from the floor until the entire room smells like a public swimming pool, complete with the added aroma of urine. Once I reach the window I can open it to air out the room while I scrub the piss stains from around the base of the toilet. Last of all, I use the mop to clean the outside of the toilet before dumping the bucket into the bowl. Finally the room starts to smell clean.
After that, I turn my attention to the tub itself. It too must be bleached, but first I remove the heavy-duty shower chair and the festering green rubber germ factory that the old woman calls a bathmat. I have tried to tell her that she needs to replace the mat but she won’t listen. I repeat my scrubbing routine, using a clean rag that I have brought with me along with the rest of my bath supplies. I will throw the rag in the garbage afterward; the thought of having it share the washing machine with the rest of the laundry turns my stomach.
Scrub scrub scrub.
I clean the inside of the tub and all surrounding surfaces with a solution of more bleach than water. When I’m satisfied that it’s finally clean, I check my watch.
Fifteen minutes have already elapsed. I have another twenty minutes, thirty if I’m lucky.
Tick tick tock tick… the clock is always ticking.
As my bath fills I can finally unpack my bag of bath supplies; shampoo, conditioner, loofah, soap and razor… typical stuff that most women keep in their bathrooms. I can’t keep the stuff in this bathroom because it’s not mine. I have a bathroom downstairs but it only has a tiny shower stall. I hate showers; I’ve always loved my baths. The only bathroom in the house that has a bathtub belongs to the old woman. It’s filled with old-person stuff; bottles and bottles of prescription pills, vitamins, laxatives and antacids. My scented soaps, lavender bubble bath and pink loofah would have no place in here.
Finally my bath is ready; steamy and inviting with fluffy white mountains of lavender scented bubbles.
Mmmm!
It’s a tiny slice of heaven, even if it’s only for a short time. I ease myself into the water and dunk my head under. It’s all worth it; even if I have to spend the same amount of time scrubbing as I do bathing. It’s all I get, so I have to cherish it.
As I reach for my washcloth I notice something on the edge of the tub.
NO! Please, No! Please don’t let it be…!
On closer inspection my fears are confirmed. The small kinky grey hair could be none other than…
A PUBE!
I shudder with revulsion as I stand up and reach for a square of toilet paper so I can remove the offending hair, which undoubtedly came from the old woman.
The elderly lady with whom I must share this bathtub is the owner of the house, who hired me to cook, clean and generally help her as her health continues to fail.
I try to remember that she is a woman like me, that she was young once but my mind sometimes has trouble making the connection.
She is a human being, and her name is Mary.
Once, she was young and thin and happy.
Now, she is old, fat and dying.
Instead of the pretty dark-haired woman pictured in the old black and white photos on the mantle, I now see a mountain of overflowing diabetic flesh, weighing in at nearly four hundred pounds.
Her legs are surreal; prehistoric tree trunks with flaky, scaly bark and bulbous, swollen roots for feet. She doesn’t wear shoes unless she leaves the house because she can’t reach her feet to put them on. Her bloated ankles appear to be overflowing the feet, which are now completely numb due to advancing neuropathy. The soles of the feet are cracked open in several places and never heal because there is so little circulation at this point that the flesh is nearly dead. Small smears of blood on the floor follow her every step around the house.
She is an amputation waiting to happen and there is nothing I can do to change it.
A perpetual infection lurks beneath the surface; her doctor maintains futile hope that it will succumb to the endless barrage of powerful antibiotic pills he keeps prescribing.
But the doctor knows the truth.
Everyone knows.
Even Mary knows that it’s just a matter of time before first one foot, then the other will have to be removed to prevent the spread of gangrene. At this point it’s simply a matter of keeping the feet attached for as long as possible. If she loses her feet I will no longer be able to take care of her.
As anyone who has seen advanced Type 2 Diabetes in action knows, once the amputations start, it’s the beginning of the end. First the foot, then the lower leg, and then the thigh… Once they have removed all of the leg and part of the ass, there’s nothing left to amputate and death follows soon afterward.
The old woman must be aware of this – how can she not be? I think she’s either heavily in denial or she has simply decided to go out happy. There isn’t any other way to explain her artery-choking diet of deep-fried, pan-fried, chicken-fried, fried-fried foods. Not a scrap of healthy food passes her lips if she can help it. She averages a six-pack of ‘diet’ soda per day and never drinks water, except to swallow pills. (and sometimes not even then.) I use my grocery allowance to buy healthy foods: vegetables, whole grains, fish and chicken. Mary orders pizzas and other takeout foods. She also chooses her own ‘groceries’ and has them delivered: cookies, doughnuts, jujubes, chocolates and candies. She crams them into her mouth by the handful, followed by increasingly larger doses of insulin to combat the rush of sugar. Her body has developed such a tolerance to insulin that it barely has any effect, even at doses that would be fatal to an ordinary person. Mary is playing with fire and I am powerless to stop her.
I mentioned that I cook for her. I TRY to cook for her, but if the food isn’t fried or sugary she turns her nose up at it. I try to avoid cooking the foods she wants. Sometimes, I wait until she takes a nap, then prepare healthy, Diabetic-friendly meals. I disappear before she wakes up, leaving her to fend for herself for a while. She then must either fry something by herself or suffer through vegetables and brown rice. Sometimes it works, but not often.
Mary’s family doesn’t visit her anymore because they don’t want to be bothered with her. To them, she is a burden and an embarrassment. It’s really quite sad. She has nobody but me to rely on, and I’m failing her miserably due to her refusal to care about her own health.
The reason I must scrub and sanitize the bathroom before I use it is her feet. Those horrid, decaying, borderline gangrenous feet. Every day she soaks them in a foot bath that I prepare for her – a solution of Epsom salts, iodine and warm water – in hopes that the infection will recede and the cracks will stop spreading. It’s mostly a futile exercise at this point but it’s better than the alternative, which is to do nothing.
Yes, she should be in a hospital but she refuses to go and has made it very clear that she will fire me if I attempt to have her taken to the hospital. Losing this job might sound like a blessing in disguise but then what would happen to Mary? The hospital won’t keep her against her will, and who would take care of her?
Certainly not her relatives.
Those vultures are hanging back, waiting for her to die so they can swoop in, exterminate the vermin, (me – domestic help no longer needed) loot her possessions and sell her house. Not that I care if I’m thrown out of here after her death; it’s just repulsive, the way they think they’re entitled to anything of hers after they have shunned her and left her to die alone.
When her daily foot bath is finished, I carry the plastic tub of water to the bathroom, where I pour the toxic bacterial stew down the bathtub drain. The water is cloudy and I try not to look at it. I discard my surgical gloves, then change my clothes and wash my hands up past the elbows afterward, followed by a healthy dose of hand sanitizer.
I’m not a germophobe. What I am is well aware of the terrifying ‘super bugs’ that have been emerging in recent years; strains of once-familiar bacteria that have mutated into antibiotic-resistant and potentially deadly versions of their former selves.
I’ve seen the antibiotics Mary is taking. Powerful stuff. I can tell that her doctor is worried. God only knows what ball-busting bionic bacteria might be lurking on her skin, especially on the legs and feet where too little blood flows and the immune system and antibiotics simply can’t reach.
I’m no dummy – I know I’m bathing in the same tub where I dump that septic soup, but the alternative is to dump it in the kitchen sink, where I wash dishes and prepare food.
So I bleach. And I scrub.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me until today that I should have been dumping the foot bath down the toilet.
I raise my head out of the steaming bath. The bubbles are gone, which means my time is probably up. I check my clock.
Sure enough, time is up.
As with many elderly people, bladder weakness is an issue with Mary so the time I can safely occupy her bathroom is limited. If she happens to wake, she will make a beeline for the bathroom. If I hear her thundering down the hallway and I’m still in the tub, there will be trouble and I will have a mess to mop up on top of it.
I pull the plug and am about to stand up when I realize that I still have some conditioner in my hair. I lay back down in the water, rinsing my hair as the tub drains. I lay there for a moment longer, savoring the last bit of my sultry paradise before I have to get out and rejoin the real world.
I sit up when I notice that the water hasn’t gone down much at all. The bath is still full.
I jump out quickly and reach for my towel.
I get dressed, keeping an eye on the tub, wishing it would hurry up and drain. I don’t want to deal with a clog after getting all nice and clean and relaxed.
Once fully dressed, I can see that I must face the fact that the drain is definitely clogged. It was probably a ball of hair or something. Ick.
I grab the plunger and work it up and down a few times until finally the water begins to drain. Whatever was plugging it either worked its way down or came back up into the tub.
As the water grows shallower, I see an object floating in the bottom of the tub; most likely the thing responsible for clogging the drain… the thing that I have essentially, been bathing with ever since I pulled the plug.
As the remainder of the water disappears down the drain, I begin to gag, then rush to the toilet and spew my guts. When I finish puking, I am moving immediately, running for the bleach and wondering if there is enough hand sanitizer to cover my entire body.
I will gather up the nerve to remove the toe from the bathtub later.
Copyright © 2012 Mandy White