Microflora

Tomorrow I'm going to hospital for surgery. I have an inguinal hernia. I don't like getting older and wearing out, but the surgery is very routine. I'm trying to sound blaze.

Nowadays they screen prospective surgical candidates to see if they are carrying MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. I gather from the WWW that 1-10% of people are colonised. It's more common in vets, presumably because we work with antibiotics. I've been given an antibiotic ointment to use inside my nostrils and an antiseptic wash to bathe in. I've been using them religiously (as depicted in this blip). By doing this I should be "decolonised" which ought to mean I am of less risk to myself, and to others, of being a source of MRSA wound infection.

WH Auden wrote a wonderful poem about being home to bacteria, yeasts and other microbes. I looked it up; here's an extract:

"...A Very Happy New Year to
all for whom my ectoderm
is as Middle-Earth to me.

For creatures your size I offer
a free choice of habitat,
so settle yourselves in the zone
that suits you best, in the pools of my pores
or the tropical forests of arm-pit and crotch
in the deserts of my fore-arms
or the cool woods of my scalp..."

From "A New Year Greeting." W H Auden January 1969.

We are all home to bugs, especially in our gut and on our skin. Our behaviour, washing, dressing, scratching, continuously effects that ecosystem and the microbes that live there.

Isn't biology fantastic?