Sickly Scent

Ever hear that scent is the sense most strongly tied to memory? It's friggin' true. Alright, a little backstory...back in 2001 when I was in the hospital after a really bad motorcycle accident, my mom was given the task of buying me deodorant. Naturally, she bought the wrong one. She got the brand right, but she got the wrong model or something...I used to use the Right Guard with the grey caps and she got the blue capped one. Usually this would bother me, but since I had more pressing issues to deal with at the time, I let it slide. Fast forward to 2006. Right Guard discontinues the grey cap edition and after trying several other brands, I wound up with the Right Guard blue caps. I've been using the blue caps for a while now and I haven't had any problems. They've been pretty much identical to the grey caps for all I can tell. However, I haven't been paying any attention to the various scents/flavors that they come in. I just get the blue cap ones and that's it. Well, this morning while sitting on the bus I kept getting whiffs of an odor that was making me sick to my stomach. It was a really familiar smell that I just couldn't put my finger on and then it hit me. It was the goddam smell I smelled like when I was in the hospital for all those weeks! It was a complete flashback and it reminded me of gym shorts, tank tops, those terrycloth socks with the rubber treads on the bottom, nurses cleaning my wounds and non-stop tv coverage of 9/11. It is really weird to think about because I had thought that the smell was like the hospital-smell or something...but it was me! Now it's making me sick to my stomach. Bleh.