One sort of strange thing that has stood out in my little journey is the shower. Shower has more than one definition so just to be clear - I am talking about the good old North American “stand naked under a perforated water outlet and let litres of water spill over you” sort of shower.

Before the surgery I took a series of five cleansing showers with special soap. These were always preceded by a regular soap and water sort of shower; so talk about being clean! Then I had my surgery on the 23rd of February and for reasons already documented elsewhere in excruciatingly boring detail, there were some problems with air bubbles and incisions. This resulted in no showers for me from the morning of February 23rd to the afternoon of Monday, March 8th.

Most of the world would say; “What in the name of anything that is holy are you droning on about?” Don’t you know, care, or understand that:

1- Over a billion people in the world don’t have access to even clean drinking water
2- A person living in sub-Saharan Africa is lucky to get access to 10 or 20 litres of water a day – in Canada you routinely consume 325 litres a day
3- At even given time 50% of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people who got sick because of the water

So what if I had to take almost two weeks of cleaning up by standing next to the wash basin. I am sure that is done routinely in much of Asia and Europe every day. I am such a whiner. But I will say that first shower felt so nice. It was so wonderful to wash my hair and to see icky stuff disappear between my toes down the drain.
A hot, five minute shower – Yet another thing to be grateful for