I spent a year working at Denver Health, a public hospital in Denver, CO, before moving back east during the COVID-19 epidemic. The radiology offices were fairly spartan and we shared adjacent bathroom facilities with the house staff that included showers. These spaces were generally clean and sanitary, but there was one unusual situation that I’ve depicted here. It concerns a certain green towel that was hanging in one of the bathroom/shower from late November 2019 until Feb 2020. The towel had already been hanging for about a week when I first took a photo on Nov 22, 2019…
Several weeks later on Dec 9, 2019, the towel was in the same position but with the addition of a partially deployed roll of toilet paper resting atop. The appearance now suggests a floating, ghost-like figure with some sort of dangling headdress, if you’ll allow…
Ten days on from that and no major changes noted. There was no discernible smell beyond the usual that I recall (let’s just assume the trail of white material on the wall to our left was outside the FOV on most other images, as it is visible on Feb 6). It did have me wondering whether any specific housekeeping policies might be in place to address an abandoned towel. If so, it would likely involve the wearing of gloves upon removal…
It’s a new year and now we’re over six weeks into the towel’s “residency.” We notice an alteration — the dangling stretch of tissue paper is no longer evident although the loose wrapping suggests a possible hasty re-wrap versus a displacement with tear-off and then a return to position. This is speculative. The towel itself meanwhile has undergone only subtle shifts in its geometry and has probably remained on the hook for the duration…
Ah-ha! At the two-month mark, we are back to baseline as the toilet roll has been removed. Note the indentation left by the roll near the towel’s apex. One senses, without touching, that it has a certain coarse stiffness (rigor towelis)…
Heading into Feb 2020 at status quo with only a partial subsidence of the apex indentation…
Whoa! Big changes afoot. The towel has been shifted to the left hook and we see a used yellow surgical mask (it perhaps a fateful portent of the nascent COVID epidemic that subsequently blossomed in March 2020) has replaced it on the right hook. But wait. A bias had been introduced! I had finally shared my little photo project with one of the radiology residents, and he later copped to being the architect of the change. This case therefore holds a major lesson about the integrity of scientific research and our fiduciary responsibilities as investigators to minimize bias and conflicts of interest (Disclosure: this project was made possible by funding from both CLOROX and TINACTIN)…
Alas. Not sure if our green towel was taken home, tossed out, or maybe it walked away on its own. But as George Harrison put it, “all things must pass.” It was quite a run.
There was no return of the infamous green towel but one of the house staff did leave behind a relic of the bygone days of medicine: a stethoscope. About as useful these days as mercury was in treating syphilis prior to Penicillin. The auscultatory device has been replaced, along with many time-honored skills in clinical diagnosis, by the CT scanner. This particular specimen was passed along to the Smithsonian Institute for posterity.
Great Exudations 