Public Health Enemy Number One

If I die of a necrotizing fasciitis or some other flesh-eating disease—or really of any infectious disease at all—I know which link will be the one to break the chain.

There’s this one spot on my back that has not been subjected to adequate hygienic practices since 1995. It’s about three quarters of the way up my torso, right there on the spine. For 20 years—ever since my mom stopped washing it for me—this part of my body has not been properly disinfected.

I can’t wash the spot by reaching back over the shoulder, although when I try, I come much closer with my left hand than with my right. I’m not nearly limber enough for the backdoor approach either. The one where your chest sticks out, and your arm points straight down until the elbow, and then your forearm takes a sharp turn back towards the head. Maybe without something in my hand, I could extend my fingers and just about reach that spot. But once I have a bar of soap or a scrubber to grip, the spot is once again rendered inaccessible. The most I can do then is graze its perimeter with my wet knuckles.

This bothers me every time I take a shower. I stand there thinking about how thoroughly I just scrubbed my triceps and my butt cheeks, and can’t help but compare the tenacity of that clean to the poor spot on my back—forever neglected and left to rot. I think about all the colonies of microbes that have been setting up camp on that spot for the better part of two decades. Those malevolent little critters just hanging around with their feet up, watching OWN TV while munching on my keratinocytes, knowing they are safe to make babies, and methodically commandeer my biochemistry; because I can never reach them. They could make a movie about those little guys. It would be like A Bugs Life or Osmosis Jones, but it would be a boring movie because there would be no conflict.

While every other part of my body gets scrubbed like the hood of a Thunderbird at a car show in downtown Des Moines, the best treatment I can provide for that one spot on my back is a lazy stream of second-hand soap-water that rolls down from my shoulders and neck.

I can’t imagine I’m the only one dealing with this crisis, either. Although I would assume it is more of a problem for males—you know, because of our bulging muscles, poor flexibility, and general toughness. If I’m right, and it’s indeed not just me who can’t reach that one spot on the back, it leads me to believe at least half our global population is running around public spaces with an approximate four squared inch area on their bodies that is teeming with angry bacteria and other mortifying microorganisms.

Does anyone realize what a calamity we’re facing? It’s not doorknobs we should worry about contacting, or GMOs, or Ebola, or that smelly guy on the 46 bus. Our fears for disease and obsessions of hygiene should be focused on that one spot on our very own backs—the one that has not been properly sanitized for almost the entirety of our lives. The one spot we can rarely see and can never reach.

It has been brought to my awareness that they make scrubbers with a handle, for the purpose of finally being able to clean oneself thoroughly. I could not be happier about this. But does anyone actually own one? I don’t. I am far too prideful to stoop so low. It should be a priority in public health to educate our people, and keep them from thinking like me. I can’t understand why it is not. I should be arrested for my ignorance. Public health workers should get these edifying adaptations in the hands of every human being around the world. They should push for a federal mandate which says soap can’t be manufactured unless it is attached to a stick.

Until public health gets its shit together, and the whole soap on stick thing catches on, we are going to have to get creative. Get scuba certified and swim a cycle in your washing machine. Start sneaking into carwashes on foot. If Panera cares enough, maybe they will come up with some sort of program. If not, we need to count on one another. This is not just for our health, but for the health of our children. We should be lending a hand to help each other properly scrub that one spot on our backs. I’m looking at you, Evangeline Lilly. My back needs you. Our future children need you.

I’m very tempted to turn this whole thing about that one spot on my back into a metaphor. Metaphors are useful. Sometimes ideas are big and scary, and it is only possible to embrace them in the second degree. That’s why I love metaphors. They can be rather beautiful.

I would say something about how that one spot on my back is the chink in my armor of human cleanliness, and how maybe there is a similar chink in my armor of human consciousness. Both these glaring areas of weakness—of vulnerability—that I don’t see and can never reach. I would suggest that maybe all the problems are not out there in the world, but right there on my back, part of my own makeup. How maybe if I realized this, and found a way to change it, I wouldn’t be so quick to call the rest of the world dirty. I would compare the way I need intervention from something beyond me to clean my body fully, to the way I need something beyond me to clean my spirit fully. I would say that maybe I am always missing a spot of my truest self—and there is nothing I can do about it—until I am humble enough to have others expose it for me and work on it with me. How maybe I am always incomplete, unless I can learn to borrow a hand from someone who is brave enough to offer it. How an isolated existence is inherently a limited existence. And therefore how the only way to be wholly pure is to rely on relationship—by entering community, by cleaning those spots others can’t reach and by having them clean mine.

I won’t do any of that though. I recently read the book Love Does. Bob Goff, the author, also seems to love the figurative world. Each chapter starts as a frivolous observation or anecdote, from which is derived some magnificent truth about God and Jesus and life. The format sometimes irritated me. At times it was powerful but too often it just came across as haughty and forced and even pollyannaish (I just heard this word and wanted to try it out. I don’t plan on ever using it again). I guess he was trying to be something like Jesus. Jesus used a lot of metaphors, too. He talked about condiments and pocket change and we’re all the better for it. I think the difference with Jesus is he never explicitly said what those metaphors were supposed to mean. That’s probably more the way to do it. Just tell a story, and leave it to others to find the meaning.

Writing the spot on my back as a metaphor could ruin what would have been a perfectly innocent bit of claptrap. That’s why I won’t make it a metaphor. I will just keep to saying I won’t be surprised if I die of necrotizing fasciitis.