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HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS • HEALTH • MEDICINE • WELLNESS
AIKEN-AUGUSTA’S MOST SALUBRIOUS NEWSPAPER • FOUNDED IN 2006
FEBRUARY 17, 2017
THE 3 LITTLE PS
What are The 3 Little Ps? FIND OUT BELOW
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llow me to take you back to a moment in my childhood. I was probably about 6 or 7 on the day this happened. My older brother was 8 or 9, and I had a younger brother still in diapers. Back in those distant days, boys and girls, Pampers, Huggies, Depends, pull-ups, and other modern conveniences were either not invented or not yet in common use. Cloth diapers still ruled the day. There was a diaper bucket next to the toilet in our bathroom, but there were times when my mother would change my little brother’s diaper and temporarily drop the dirty diaper in the toilet. She
would rinse it and transfer it to the diaper bucket later. Good times, right Mom? That’s what confronted me on the fateful day in question: a diaper in the toilet. There was no family rule against micturating on a dirty diaper. As I stood there doing so, by dint of habit my left hand was in its usual spot on the handle of the tank. As I finished up, I automatically flushed the toilet without thinking. About half a nanosecond later I got that extreme uh-oh feeling. It’s the same feeling adults get the instant they realize they’re in the process of slamming a locked car door with their keys still inside. But maybe this would work out. The diaper slithered out of sight in a rush of water, and I went
back outside to play without another thought. Fast-forward a day or two and there was a backhoe digging up our back yard to find and remove the blockage I had created. Oops. The diaper was definitely flushable. I saw it go down with my own two eyes. But that didn’t mean it was flushable. It wasn’t. What does any of this have to do with the 3-word mantra of the Medical Examiner? (Those are the words running across this very page above: health, medicine, wellness.) Virtually every list of the greatest inventions in human history includes indoor plumbing. It Please see FLUSH page 10