Mmmmm....Hospital smell.
Jan. 11th, 2005 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaHospitals don't smell like they used to, anymore. They don't smell like oldskool antiseptic (betadyne and rubbing alcohol) and fresh, well-worn linens and sunwarmed varnish any longer--they just smell like nothing. Beyond antiseptic. They have no odors whatsoever. This unaccountably depresses me.
I just took a pair of aspirin, and just for a second, the taste of the aspirin in my mouth was exactly like the smell of a corridor I remember at the Uniontown Hospital when I was a child. It was in this little annex by the emergency room...just an average hallway in which there were a number of various doctors' offices or small clinics or testing labs or something. I recall, vaguely, that my grandmother or grandfather had to be taken to one of those offices for some reason, and I tagged along. I couldn't've been more than nine or ten.
It was early afternoon, and I was wandering along the hall, probably bored out of my gourd because my grandparent's appointment was taking forever as usual. The walls were the same color as some of the walls in my gradeschool: a pale, gentle blue with the heaters running along their bottoms and the windowsills painted a bland, generic tan. The windows were just like old school windows, too--metal frames, with little sideways latches you twisted to pull the lower panes open--and both warm sun and a slightly warm breeze were leaking in through them. There was a quiet shush of voices in offices, and a nurse strolled by in an old white nurse's uniform.
And the air, warm and dry and clean, smelled like aspirin taste. Not bitter and acrid like aspirin that's started to melt on your tongue, mind you--but strangely etheric, astringent and vaporous, like some sort of unearthly coughdrop you take to fume open the third eye of your memory.
I really miss that smell. I spent so much damned time in the hospital in my youth (either myself, or because one or both of my grandparents were in there) that I actually equate that oldtime hospital smell with better days. I think this in some way explains my love of old hospitals and old medical equipment.
I just took a pair of aspirin, and just for a second, the taste of the aspirin in my mouth was exactly like the smell of a corridor I remember at the Uniontown Hospital when I was a child. It was in this little annex by the emergency room...just an average hallway in which there were a number of various doctors' offices or small clinics or testing labs or something. I recall, vaguely, that my grandmother or grandfather had to be taken to one of those offices for some reason, and I tagged along. I couldn't've been more than nine or ten.
It was early afternoon, and I was wandering along the hall, probably bored out of my gourd because my grandparent's appointment was taking forever as usual. The walls were the same color as some of the walls in my gradeschool: a pale, gentle blue with the heaters running along their bottoms and the windowsills painted a bland, generic tan. The windows were just like old school windows, too--metal frames, with little sideways latches you twisted to pull the lower panes open--and both warm sun and a slightly warm breeze were leaking in through them. There was a quiet shush of voices in offices, and a nurse strolled by in an old white nurse's uniform.
And the air, warm and dry and clean, smelled like aspirin taste. Not bitter and acrid like aspirin that's started to melt on your tongue, mind you--but strangely etheric, astringent and vaporous, like some sort of unearthly coughdrop you take to fume open the third eye of your memory.
I really miss that smell. I spent so much damned time in the hospital in my youth (either myself, or because one or both of my grandparents were in there) that I actually equate that oldtime hospital smell with better days. I think this in some way explains my love of old hospitals and old medical equipment.
