Reply To: The last ten years of contamination and checking ocd. And where I seem to be now

[wannabefreeParticipantParticipant]

Well… Today my grandson visited… Complete chaos! But it is okay. I crawled about on the floor with him for a little while… Hands and knees on the carpet. Some of us have outdoor shoes on… Now… If that cannot make him ill, it won’t make me ill either. I went in a burger bar yesterday, on the way to a visit. We use the touch screens to order food and drink. Are they perfectly clean? Let’s be practical here, there’s no way they’ll be perfect. The only place in the building to wash hands is the toilets, and all the doors coming back into the restaurant have pull handles. So ‘Nobody’ had clean hands. We ate the burgers and the fries, with bare fingers. (Is there really any other way?) Now this is a national, in fact, International company. When we went abroad on a holiday trip, some years ago, on a coach, we sought out this same restaurant company, cos we knew what the food was like. And I paid by card, which helped immensely. If just one person of the thousands that eat there every day, got the slightest twinge of tummy-ache, it would be all over the tabloid newspapers as a ‘scoop’. But they don’t. So, when dealing with worries about contamination issues, in fairness, the people around us have already got something on their hands, before we even enter the ‘equation’. We don’t really put people at any more risk that they aren’t already at. In Biology, it is termed ‘Normal Flora’, the stuff that is usually there, five minutes after washing hands, in contact with air etc. And that has been there for most of our natural lives.  If we kill every germ, we will ultimately deplete our resistance, but also, some germs/bacteria are termed as good. I believe the word for that is ‘Symbiotic’.  The problem is when we have difficulty just letting go a little bit, and let nature do it’s thing for us. That is clinical evidence in our defence. Reasonably clean…

God bless you for reading.

Wannabe