I was in
the middle of a twelve day stretch. Sprinting down the hall, carrying copies of
a chart for the ambulance crew, I realized I was smelling buttered toast. It
was hours after breakfast. “Strange,” I thought, “but oh well.” We saw our patient off to the ER.
Finally at
the end of my shift, I sat down to chart. I realized I had worked up a sweat
and still felt a little damp. It hit me again: the smell of buttered toast. It
wasn’t the fresh, yummy kind of toast; it was the smell of older, reheated, smeared
with margarine kind of toast.
For a
moment I had a dreadful thought that it was some sort of menopause thing. Even
though I’m as old as the Super Bowl, I still am too young for menopause. I
dared to sniff my armpit. No, it wasn’t there.
Did a resident with buttered fingers touch me when I helped transfer him or
her? I didn’t know. My only solution was to shower as soon as I got home.
How does
this relate to stink bugs?
About a
month ago, at the in-laws, we saw a large beetle on the ceiling. It looked like
one of the stink bug family. They’ve been an oddity I started noticing over the
last ten years or so. The ones I’ve seen have a proboscis, tiny head and heavily
armored legs. They move slowly, mechanically.
[Once, years ago, I watched one such bug
trapped in a spider web. The spider, maybe 1/20 its size, was biting the
behemoth’s armored leg and trying to spin more web around it. Like a wildebeest
being slowly killed by inexperienced lions, its sheer strength was exactly what
was causing it to suffer. The scene wasn’t going to end well, but I had neither
the heart to watch nor the oomph to end the creature’s misery. I’m not proud to
say that I turned away.]
As we
looked at the large beetle invading our dinner party, I said we should scoop it
up and put it outside because I thought it was a stink bug. Well, my niece’s
boyfriend smushed it.
In a few
seconds, we were enveloped in a green, wet smelling odor. We laughed because
there was nothing else to do.
That week,
I ran out of conditioner at the wrong time of the paycheck. I stopped off at
the store and picked up some 88¢ or 99¢ conditioner. It would have to do. One
was labeled as freesia scented. I like the smell of freesia; why not? I’d get
paid in a few days anyway.
In the
shower, I shampooed and conditioned.
Oh, no.
Why didn’t
I test smell the conditioner before I bought it?
Instantly I
was back at the in-laws’, the memory of stink bug and unspoken “I told you
so’s” making me laugh. Only I didn’t laugh. I was trying to not gag in the
shower.
Payday came
and I bought a different conditioner, one more expensive (and hopefully better
quality) per ounce. Then came that crazy, busy day at work when I first smelled
the buttered toast.
Always
ready to play detective, the next day when I showered, I sniffed the new
conditioner. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary. I shampooed and conditioned as
usual. By the end of the day, I was smelling buttered toast again.
I hadn’t
eaten differently, except maybe a lot more fast food in what turned into a 60
hour work week. I hadn’t worn perfume. It was the same laundry detergent.
The next
day, I used the stink bug– I mean freesia–
conditioner. No buttered toast scent taunted me. The next day, I used the other
conditioner. It had done that which for which I had bought it: increased the
volume to my hair. But I smelled buttered toast.
My
experiment indicated that the conditioner was the cause. Happily, I wasn’t
experiencing olfactory hallucinations after all.
I asked my
husband and he said he didn’t notice it, even when he smelled my hair. Since I
don’t normally have people come that
close to smell my hair, I decided to ditch the freesia and go with the buttered
toast.
At least
until my next shopping trip, that is. Maybe I can find a conditioner that
smells like pizza.
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