Blistex Memories

Blistex Fruit Smoothies Triple Tropical lip balm. It isn't the brand or the scent that I normally buy (I'm a strawberry Chapstick kind of gal), but it was left over from a pack that we bought for the big kids and I stuffed it in one of my coat pockets to use as "emergency" lip balm. I had no idea that is exactly what it would become.

I'm one of those lip balm addicts -- I have to have some with me at all times or I go into fierce withdrawal. For some bizarre reason, I have had that same tube of lip balm on my person every single time I've been to the hospital over the last few years. I now associate the acrid, vaguely citrusy smell with fear and uncertainty and gut-wrenching worry. It was in the pocket of my winter coat when I walked into the hospital, 26 weeks pregnant with Max, and was shocked to discover that I was in pre-term labor (2 cm dilated, 50% effaced). It was the only lip balm I had with me when I returned to the hospital a week later on the night Max was born. It lived in my coat pocket during all those visits to the NICU -- while I sat by Max's isolette, during all those trying sessions in the pump room, and as I walked the hospital halls. When Max had his urgent hernia surgery when he was 13 weeks old (just days after he was supposed to have been born), it was with me as I slept next to his bed in the pediatric unit. I'll never forget how very small and tiny and still he looked lying in that great big hospital bed, swaddled in rough, white, institutional blankets.

The blasted lip balm was in my coat pocket when I was hospitalized only 22 weeks into my second pregnancy, and it was there when I was hospitalized again at 30 weeks (I was scared to death both times). Since I had already begun to loathe that particular tube of lip balm, I bought a new tube for my hospital bag (Blue Crazeberry Chapstick) ... only to accidentally leave it on my bedside table when my water broke in the middle of the night at 34 weeks. When Max fractured his leg and had to be hospitalized overnight, it mysteriously appeared in the pocket of one of my OTHER coats. And last night, while I sat on a gurney in the hallway of the pediatric ER, holding my teary-eyed little boy, guess what I found in my pocket and gave him to play with? He doesn't seem to have the same bad associations with that particular tube of lip balm, because he was sporting a curious tangerine-colored moustache by the time we were discharged (ever so grateful to learn that Max's fingers, which had been pinched in an interior door, were just bruised and not broken).

To me, our hospital's signature "scent" will always be Blistex Fruit Smoothies Triple Tropical lip balm. One whiff of the lip balm carries with it a host of other hospital memories -- the smell of the antiseptic NICU soap (with a dash of aloe vera Purell thrown in), the feel of the scratchy hospital sheets, the songs that were playing during my stays ("The Rowing Song" by Patty Griffin is Max's signature song, Molly's is Deb Talan's "Comfort"). It's amazing how the smell of something can trigger so many memories that would otherwise be forgotten.

I'm throwing it out.