Like a Breath of Fresh Air

I had the pleasure of changing a diaper today on a rather wiggly nine month old. He is the baby boy of my friend, EL, and she came over so we could share a bit of our day. She got to tell my teenage kids what to do a few times, and I, well, I changed a poop diaper. She didn’t ask me, I just did it, because I always wanted people to do that when my kids needed to be changed, over a decade ago. I wanted the rule to be whoever was in possession of the baby when the poop occurred was required legally to change the diaper, but usually it was me regardless of who coaxed the baby to poop by excessive feeding or bouncing. I will spare you the details of the diaper change, but the hardest part was definitely putting on the fresh diaper. That baby boy can roll!

Changing that diaper reminded of me when I took my daughter, S, to the allergist’s office the other day. I had made an appointment for S because she has been breaking out in hives nightly for the past month, and I couldn’t convince myself it was a patch of eczema any longer. Also, she keeps wheezing, and her third cold in a month doesn’t seem to concern the pediatrician as much as it does me. Poor S didn’t make out well in the immune system department. She isn’t the allergy queen, but in our house, she is definitely like a duchess or princess or some lesser royalty. So to the allergist’s we went.

We waited a good forty five minutes for S's exam before her name was called. After the nurse took S's vitals, she escorted us to an exam room and asked S to sit on the table. I sat in the chair next to the table, and the nurse flipped through S’s file. The room was quiet. As we sat there, S and I became aware of the most horrible stench. It was distinctly the smell of an old dirty diaper, a smell unlike any other smell. You know it when you pass a trashcan in public, or when you go past the nursery at the gym, or when a frazzled mother is loading groceries in the back of her minivan. Dirty diaper, the smell whispers to you, a gentle breeze of stink. That’s of what the exam room reeked.

S and I gave each other that look, the one with a hate glare, curled lip and wrinkled nose, the universal face for “dear lord but what is that nasty smell.” We continued to look back and forth at each other, our grimaces growing more exaggerated. She mouthed, just breathe through your mouth, at me. I mouthed back, that’s easy for you; your nose is already clogged. I don’t know how well she can read snarling lips.

Finally, I grew a pair and said to the nurse, “It doesn’t smell very good in here.”

“I thought it was just me,” she said.

Great. We had a live one.

“Do you think there might be a dirty diaper in the trashcan?” I asked.

I want to emphasize how polite I was because A. as the exchange continued, I had no reason to be, and 2. It smelled like a dirty diaper in that room, and she knew it before she took us in there. This happened next.

“Let me check,” the nurse said, and plunged her hands IN THE TRASHCAN. She dug around for a bit, again, in a trash can in the doctor’s office, and then said,” I don’t see one.”

S gave me a look. The look said, did she just stick her hands in the trashcan? Is she going to touch me with those hands?

The nurse stepped out of the room and then came back with a can of air freshener. “Let’s see if this helps,” she said, and sprayed the artificially scented aerosol spray all over the exam room. At the allergist’s office, in the shit smelling room, with my asthmatic hive-ridden child. “There,” she added, "that’s better.”

Next, it was time to go down the hall for S’s pulmonary function test. For you regular breathers, a pulmonary function test is where you blow as hard and fast and long as possible into a mouthpiece, hooked to a computer, which records the force and rate of your exhale to determine your lung function. Normal lungs would be able to empty about eighty percent of their volume. S’s, between the asthma, the colds, and the Febreze, worked, at best, around seventy-five percent.

Once S had attempted her test three times and was completely winded, the nurse led us back to the exam room. Whatever masking effect the air freshener had was completely gone by the time we went back inside the room. We sat back down and the nurse left the door open to allow us fresh air. S had surpassed mouth breathing and was at panting. We sat there for another ten minutes until the nurse came back and announced, “It’s not any better in here, is it?”

“No!” S and I said together, rather loudly.

The nurse looked at the trash can again, and then picked it up and placed it outside the exam room door. While in the hall, she peeked at the empty exam room next to ours, and decided to move us to that room, which is how I would have started the appointment, had I been her.

It’s a good thing my kid isn’t allergic to the smell of baby shit. Or stupidity.