Personal Growth

 First, disclaimers:

1) This post is gross.

2) I hesitate writing this because it feels a little like making light of COVID which is borderline inappropriate. Having very recently lost two close family members from it, I acknowledge that it's a terrible, terrible, illness. I also acknowledge that laughter is still important. 

3) This post is not political. If you read something political into it, that because you're inserting your own politics. Don't blame me for that and call me conservative or liberal or anti- or pro- anything. 

Now, a post. One of those stories I want to tell my grandkids and make sure I get right. Or at least my version of right. 

If you ever have a medical emergency involving bodily fluids, I'm your girl. Profuse bleeding? I got you. Need someone to hold your hair back while you're ravaged by a stomach bug? Just holler. However, and I wrote about this previously when describing my disdain for hand sanitizer but it bears repeating in the context of this story, I can't handle snot. 

I totally blame a kid who sat next to me in elementary school. (I won't share his name because he probably still lives with the shame of it.) He always had a runny nose, and he never seemed to notice. A glop just sat there below his nose all of the time. I can still see it in my head. It's a wonder I passed third grade when living with that trauma every day. All these years later, if I see a kid with runny nose, I'm grabbing a tissue and taking care of that business right then - social norms be damned. 

Then about a week ago, my employer started providing free COVID testing to staff from 6-9 a.m. every morning. I immediately offered to help. See, many people in my profession are on the front lines of COVID exposure, except I find myself on the second-to-front line. I desperately want to help, but the ways I can help from my office are limited. 

Until we started COVID testing. If someone is exposed, feels fine, but wants to be sure they don't transmit the virus to others, we can test them and provide some peace of mind. If someone wakes up with the sniffles and can't let go of the idea it might be the actual, literal plague, we can help. Even someone who hasn't seen their elderly mother in months but wants some reassurance they won't take something extra with them on their weekend trip - we can help them, too. I volunteered, completed the online training course to become certified, and started showing up.

A sidebar or two: I am currently working on a dissertation about what makes early career teachers want to remain in the profession, so I'm studying factors that contribute to job satisfaction. Leadership and feeling valued and such are obvious choices, but I'm particularly interested in the idea of self-actualization as it relates to the job satisfaction of teachers. I believe that the idea or feeling that you are doing what you are meant and made to do is essential, and that while not all people get to self-actualization from their jobs I'm betting most teachers do. 

I'm not technically a teacher anymore (I will always be one in my heart), but the self-actualization I strive for through my career is still important, and for me that involves being helpful - making a contribution to my organization that ultimately provides more and better opportunities for generations of people to be educated. 

This, of course, reminds me of the episode of Friends where Joey told Phoebe there was no such thing as a selfless good deed. He posits that doing good for others makes you feel good about yourself and, therefore, is in some way selfish. Try as she might, she can't prove him wrong.

So I volunteer in the COVID testing center in order to fulfill my need to be helpful to schools and, thus, do what I was made to do. In other words, it's highly likely my benevolence is mostly selfish. 

/end philosophical sidebar

Anyway...

I feel perfectly safe working in the COVID testing center. I am masked and gloved, and the test-takers and I never touch the same items. (Big props to anyone who wears an N95 mask regularly because that thing makes my whole darn face hurt but ain't nothing getting through there.) 

Administering the test goes like this: I approach a vehicle, confirm the identity of the test-taker, hand them a swab in a sealed container, have them open the swab and insert it into their nostril "about an inch - far enough for resistance but not so far as to cause pain," swirl it around at least five times, and then repeat in the other nostril. Then, the person has to thread the swab into a testing card where I have carefully placed a solution to perform the test. I hold the card, they hold the swab. Once it's inserted they have to spin it around three times to ensure the sample is tested correctly. Then I seal it all up and set a timer for fifteen minutes until the test is ready to be read. 

When I first started doing tests, this is what I heard in my head:

Please take this giant q-tip and stick it up your nose. Make sure you get lots of snot and boogers on there, and then put it on the other side and get some of those boogers, too. Now stick those boogers into this card I'm holding and spin it around so that they are well-distributed. I need to watch you the whole time to make sure you're doing it correctly, so please excuse me if I a gag a little. 

Strangely, after several days of testing, it doesn't seem to bother me as much. Every once in a while if there's a particularly colorful snot I accidentally make a face, but I don't gag at all. This is personal growth, people. It's like I have developed a resistance to the grossness of snot. It only took me 44 years and pandemic. 

But I'm still not using any gloopy hand sanitizer.