COVIDISM: DOES IT PASS THE SMELL TEST?

By Gregory Smith, MD

August 2020

I think I have washed my hands more times in the last five months during this pandemic that I did the entire time I was in medical school, including my surgery rotations. I work most of the time in my “new” home office that is in the guest bedroom, seeing as how we have very few guests just wandering through this year looking for a place to lay their weary heads. There is of course a bathroom a few steps from my desk, so I am usually washing my hands in there at least a half dozen times a day. Now, we have various soap dispensers around the house upstairs and down. The one that I have been using most recently has the scent lemon verbena. I have never had the pleasure of washing my hands using lemon verbena scented hand soap, being a lavender/mint/rosemary kind of guy usually, so this was an eye and nose opener for me. The smell is sort of pungent, acerbic and brisk, which is not to say pleasant but not altogether unpleasant either. I just decided after a few days that if I was going to have to make my way through an entire bottle of this stuff, I might as well make the best of it. I taught myself to appreciate hand washing time in the upstairs bath with the lemon verbena, because if I could still smell the stuff, it was highly unlikely that I had caught the COVID. Instant daily testing at home!
Another way we take the COVID challenge a couple times a week is to ride our bicycles up what we now have affectionately dubbed “COVID Hill”, an undeveloped street that seems to go almost straight up for a quarter mile and is enough to make you wheeze and gasp for breath on even your best days. This street is so steep that we often have to zig zag all the way up to the top, instead of pulling it in a straight line. Much like lemon verbena scented hand soap, if you make it up this particular hill, ain’t no way you got the COVID.
I got my second pandemic haircut the other day, because I just can’t stand it when things get shaggy and unkempt. I wore my mask, sat in the car until my appointed time, went in and was taken back by Carlene, who has cut my hair for years now, and proceeded to get cleaned up. There were two other people in the shop at that time, Kim, the co-owner who had cut my hair all the way back in medical school times, and one other stylist. As I was getting clipped, I heard a loud, drawn out, almost ecstatic moan of pleasure from across the room behind us. “It feels soooooo good to take this thing off at the end of the day!” the employee said as she removed the mask she had undoubtedly been wearing her entire shift. Without missing a beat, Carlene turned towards her and replied, “Yes! Just like taking your bra off at the end of the day. I don’t know which is better!” Now, I am not usually one who is shy about throwing down and adding my own quips or jokes or whatever, but I was so stunned by this that I just sat there and smiled. I think in this day and age, that was probably the right decision and the smartest move.
It is close to September, which is close to October, which will be my 63rd birthday. I have almost made it. I was talking to my brother about the latest worldly stresses, and I said that if the COVID didn’t get me, I was going to live to be older than our father was when he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at age sixty two, just a couple months shy of his 63rd. “I think about that every day”, said my brother soberly. Come to think of it, so do I. I told my wife about this little exchange at the end of a very long, very hard week, and I burst into tears. “It makes me so sad. I can’t help crying.” Being the wonderful woman and loving wife that she is, she softly said, “I love it. It makes you human.”
I had one other little episode the other day that was weird. My wife was gone to Europe, flying a work trip, and I was alone at home. I was watching TV, doing the usual stuff, when all of a sudden I was overcome with a brief, fleeting feeling of doom/panic/dread/fear/hopelessness/anger all rolled up into one. It lasted mere seconds, I made a little gasp, took a couple of deep breaths, and it was gone. I was fine. Has this happened to you? COVID angst I guess. It has to find a way to come out sometime, somehow.
Lastly, it is almost sunset at 8:15 PM as I write this. Though in some ways this has seemed like the longest summer ever on record, it is already starting to wane, and fall is coming. What will it hold? More COVID? Flu? Both. Working at home? Football or not? Will the holidays be anything like normal? Fall is my favorite season and time of year, but this one will most assuredly be different. I guess all we can do is keep working, riding bikes, having birthdays, getting our haircut, and living life as it comes to us.

Take time to stop and smell the lemon verbena. It may let you know that you don’t have the COVID.

Gregory Smith, MD is a psychiatrist who blogs at gregsmithmd. He describes himself as “Son, father, grandfather, psychiatrist, friend, music lover, amateur photographer, traveler, writer, thinker, dreamer, geek. Yeah, I guess that about covers it.”

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