I guess if you have read any of my previous blog posts you may already be primed to realize that the package I found in my mailbox today would not be all that exciting to the average normal human being. But I’m going to continue with the setup anyway, because I don’t really know where else to go with this idea.
So I live in Fairfax, which has the advantage over my last place of residence that mail is actually delivered to your home by a friendly mail delivery person. Unless of course you live in a newly created unit in the basement of a house and have been unable to persuade the US post office that your address exists. In that case, you rent a mailbox at the Fairfax post office.
I actually like having a mailbox. The anonymity is comforting because of serial killers and such, and it’s a sweet little ritual, going to get the mail. Sadly, the intervals between the sweet little rituals tend to get pretty lengthy as I always seem to be zooming by the post office on my way to work and never seem to feel I have the time to stop. So my tiny mailbox gets so stuffed I can barely get the wedge of mail out of it. And when I do - Toss! Toss! Toss! - it’s not like there is a pile of heartfelt personal letters left over. Occasionally an envelope from my dad containing a photocopied newspaper article with Love, Dad scrawled beneath it.
But today I had a large padded manila envelope. It was the kind of envelope that would make a person think ooh! did I order something fun I have forgotten about? At this point, intuition will surely tell you that it was not a bracelet from Sundance that I had purchased at 3am on some sleepless night. Nor was it a gift from some loving friend in another state or overseas who just felt like I needed a lift. It was...a free sample of Trio Ostomy Pearls! I had indeed ordered these online. And I had definitely forgotten I ordered them. Because who in their right mind would want to remember ordering tiny sachets of super absorbent gelling and odor control pearls for an ostomy?
Their packaging was deceptively alluring. A picture of what looked like the Milky Way on acid, with the tag line The future of ostomy is in your hands. An ostomy, for those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered one, is a hole in a person’s body that is artificially created to behave like another hole in a person’s body. Ostomies save lives. People live completely normally with them. Thus we in the nursing profession, not to mention the owners of the ostomies themselves, are perpetually grateful for them. But at that precise moment, I didn’t really want the future of ostomies to be in my hands.
In fact I will admit to the unworthy thought as I walked out of the post office: why couldn’t I just get a bracelet from Sundance in the mail like ordinary people?
The Trio Ostomy Pearls were a free sample I had ordered from Professional Products & Services LLC (guys, seriously? That’s your best shot at a name?) to take care of an issue I had encountered in the course of my daily work. Suffice to say, I was really hoping that these small sachets would enhance the quality of life of a beloved patient.
If they did, I knew I would feel fantastic. And yet, as I walked back to my car, perusing the cover letter from Professional Blah Blah Services, I could not help feeling that my weird and peculiar job was becoming like a giant letter I wore on my forehead, like the A in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. H for hospice, perhaps? D for Death? Good people of Fairfax! Watch me leave the post office with a free sample of ostomy pearls! Envy my life!
The second paragraph of the letter from PPS Healthcare was in bold and underlined. Please note it said, that silicone is different than hydrocolloid and the application is different. Skin MUST by dry before application of the seal. And no heat is needed.
This probably makes no sense at all to you. Rest assured, it made no sense whatsoever to me, and I had ordered the free sample. There was no seal. There were just sachets. There was no application involved. You just put them in the ostomy bag. Heat had never been in question. Why would heat be needed? Why did they need to tell me heat was not needed? This is the kind of nonsense that nurses put up with all the time. We just read it, go huh? and move on.
I unlocked my car and threw the Trio Ostomy Pearls free sample disconsolately on my back seat. It landed beside a pair of pale yellow flowering salvias I had just bought myself at the ACE nursery. Yellow and white salvias are among the only plants I have been able to find that the deer really don’t eat. Thus I have been buying every nursery out of them for months.
When I got home, I put on some fabulously excellent music and I planted the salvias in a bare spot in my garden. They nodded hopefully there in the darkness, drinking up the great soaking of water I gave them and offering me their simple wisdom: Do not despair at the future of ostomies being in your hands. When you come home from a long day of caring for the dying, we will be here with our sweet little deerproof yellow flowers. We do not care about gel pearls or the consistency of bodily fluids. We just look up at the sun and take in nutrients from the soil and drink the water you sporadically remember to sprinkle on us. It’s not nearly enough, it hasn’t rained since May for godsake, but hey, we do not hold this against you. You, like all humans, are just doing your best. And maybe someday soon your post office box will contain a bracelet from Sundance.
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