Up The Farway Tree

The World's Cleanest Fly




This is a story about a pair of latex gloves, a sterile medical procedure and an unfortunate fly. Interested? Then read on.

So there I am, sitting quietly, minding my own business, whilst making up this afternoons dose of intravenous antibiotics. As I have a port (permanent IV line under skin) the whole process has to be extremely sterile in order to avoid any infection being introduced into the line. This involves excessive and repetitive hand washing, careful opening of syringe and needle packets onto sterile drapes, much swabbing of things with alcohol wipes and most importantly, the donning of sterile latex gloves. Each pair of gloves is packed into its own sterile package, which when opened has a further packet to unfold, thereby revealing a pair of neatly presented 100% sterile gloves. The packaging assures me this to be true, unless opened or damaged. The packaging on this afternoons gloves was neither opened or damaged, so you can imagine my surprise when I unfolded the packet to reveal a dead fly firmly squashed onto one of the gloves. I thought my eyes were deceiving me, but I could clearly make out one flattened and distorted wing, and what looked to be some sort of antennae sticking out at a funny angle. I am intrigued to know at what stage in the process a fly managed to find its way into a latex factory and onto my gloves. I assume that the gloves are made sterile by irradiation after initial packaging, which would imply the fly has also been irradiated until sterile. Therefore I am now making claim to owning the worlds cleanest fly (albeit a dead one). In case anybody is concerned, I did not use the gloves but have instead kept them as a souvenir.

From the above ramble, you will have guessed that I have gone ahead with the pre-Christmas IV's. This was largely decided when the CF nurse phoned last week to say " Do you want to start your IV's tomorrow?" My initial response of "uhmmmmm..." quickly prompted a retort of " tomorrow or monday; those are your choices". There did not appear to be a third option of "neither, because I'm not having any". I therefore decided to go for Monday, and was relieved to have seemingly made a sensible choice, because over the few intervening days I was becoming more symptomatic and would have required IV's before Christmas anyway. The only downside is a very itchy head that one of the IV's appears to be giving me, in combination with numbness around my mouth (like I've been to the dentist). As a result I am being forced to put a great deal of effort into the avoidance of excessive head scratching and drooling whilst in public.

Its less than 3 weeks to Christmas, so I am getting a little excited. I am not into my countdown of "..it's x amount of sleeps until Christmas" yet, but this will come soon enough. I think I will put my Christmas tree up this weekend, and simply ignore any bah humbug 'it's far to early' comments. I have already donned my staircase with magical icicle lights, which I may be inclined to leave up well into the new year; my excuse being that LED's are more energy efficient (or something).