Pneumonochrome

Well, this is the last day you’ll have to hear from me, and my interesting-but-rather-commonplace brush with microbes today was in a class. The girl that sat next to me had a definite sweaty/B.O. smell going on. Now, I remember that in my Anatomy class we were told that the smell of B.O. is not caused by our sweat/secretions themselves, but by the results of bacteria metabolizing those secretions. Nothing else I did today was out of the ordinary, and I’ve covered most of the really ordinary stuff already, so here you go. That’s my week of microbe interactions.

Waking up this morning, I found that the pimple I mentioned popping the other day was feeling quite sore. It seemed to be infected with something that was causing a stronger-than-usual-for-a-pimple pyogenic reaction. I lanced the pimple (there was some rather hard skin over it, and it wasn’t really coming to a head), and emptied it of all the puss I could, then I cleaned it with isopropyl alcohol, and used some triple-antibiotic ointment on it. It’s now covered with a bandaid, and I’m not noticing the tenderness that I was when I woke up. Whatever microbe was causing the infection is now, hopefully, dead and the sore on my arm will, again hopefully, heal without further problem

I also washed the dishes that had been building up for a few days this morning. As some of them had contained foods with high sugar contents and had been sitting around for a few days, there were probably a number of microbes beginning to make their homes there as well. We use an antibacterial dish soap in our home, and we check every dish once its dry to make sure we don’t feel any filminess (this is mostly to make sure that if the food was greasy, I didn’t miss some and to make sure that I rinsed them well enough), so I imagine we took care of most of the microbes on the dishes when we washed them.

We also have some dough in the fridge right now, souring, because I love me some sourdough bread. My understanding is that it is bacteria in the dough that actually cause it to go “sour.” In this case, we’re not trying to get rid of the bacteria, at least not yet. We’ve got to let the starter get sour, and then we’ll have to let the yeast we will put in it cause the dough to rise. Once the bacteria have finished their work though, we’ll have no qualms about unceremoniously throwing them in the oven and burning them to death.

Today was a school day again, so I would definitely have to include the microbes that you run into in a day of classes and in public restrooms. I also noticed some rust around the faucet in one of the restrooms, and though rust is not caused by microbes, it definitely does produce a fertile growing ground for many microbes. My wife was not feeling well today, complaining of standard “cold” symptoms, so I expect there’s probably a Rhinovirus at play there. I was actually quite paranoid about washing my hands today. A friend related a story about a coworker who they knew never washed his hands. My friend worked computer technical support and related to me how whenever he had to help this guy, he would only touch his keyboard with a pencil or other inanimate object as a barrier. I work in a computer lab, and that set me to suspecting that everyone who used the computer was sick, and had poor bathroom hygeine, so I washed my hands after almost every patron I helped. I also found myself spraying down my desktop with surface cleaner and using alcohol preps on my keyboard.

For lunch today I had yoghurt. Isn’t that a funny way to spell that word? Checking the carton, it was noticed that it contained live cultures of L. acidopholus and B. bifidum. I don’t know much about either of those species, but know that they are both bacteria, and are used to bring about the characteristic consistency of yoghurt. As I get toward the end of this week, I realize just how… boring… my life is. I really generally only go to class, go to work, and go home to eat and go to bed each day, and I do the same things in class and work from day to day. Sorry this isn’t a more interesting read.

Well, today, there really wasn’t much to tell. I did the same morning routine as I always do, so most of that information can be found by referring to day one. I went to church today, and there were many young children around, so I’m sure there were plenty of microbes, but I also wash my hands frequently, so most of them that I might have picked up were hopefully removed. After church we went to my in-laws house for dinner and we had spare ribs, sour cream potatoes, and corn on the cob. I found out after some research that, because we pasteurize milk now, sour cream cannot be made without inoculating the milk with bacteria to cause the milk to sour instead of just spoil. The bacteria commonly used for this include: Streptococcus diacetilactis, Streptococcus lactis, Streptococcus cremoris, Leuconostoc citrovorum, and Leuconostoc dextranicum. Three of those are from a family we’ve studied, but are not pathogenic in humans. Yet another place that I’ve come into contact with bacteria, or at least the work of bacteria, without previously realizing it. I’m at home now, and really ready to go to bed. I can’t think of anything else I did today that I haven’t done on the previous days that would have brought me into contact with any microbes. I’m sure just about everything I do brings me into contact with them, but again, I’m pretty sure you don’t want me to list everything I do over the course of the day, so I’m making and end of writing for the night.

I volunteered in the ER from midnight to 4am today. There were lots of sick people, though I’m not generally given the diagnoses for the patients as a volunteer, so I don’t know what microbes were involved in any case in particular. I do know that I’m encouraged to use hand sanitizer every time I exit a patient’s room, which I do. Because of this and frequent washing, I’m pretty sure that the microbe population, on my hands at least, is fairly low while I’m there. I’m also sure that I came in contact with quite a few varieties of microbe as I moved patients around the hospital, from bed to bed, got them blankets, and just sat speaking with them.

Most of the rest of the day, I spent studying, a relatively microbe-free exercise. However, I did have root beer for dinner, which was created using yeast, so there’s one place that bacteria ended up in my life that I wouldn’t normally have noticed it. I’m not sure if yeast remain present in the root beer after it’s fermented, but if so, they likely passed through my GI tract like everything else that goes in my mouth. As for now, I’m going to bed