Roach in the drawers

I grew up in New York City where we had to deal with cockroaches all the time. In fact, I remember, as a teenager, that getting a drink of water at night was a complex procedure. It entailed leaning into the kitchen to turn on the light and waiting for the roaches to scatter (like a living black rug being sucked back under the counters) before I stepped in to fill my glass.

But roaches don't just exist in NYC, as I discovered when I began a new job cleaning the kennels at a Big-10 university's veterinary teaching hospital one summer. The kennels were set up like this: the 10 wards (each ward with 5 large "big dog" kennels and 20 smaller dog/cat cages in it) were set up back to back. There was a channel at the back of each cage so it could be easily sprayed out with a hose and disinfectant. Behind the channels between each pair of wards was a dank no man's land area where lived the most gigantic cockroaches that anyone there had ever seen-besides those people, of course, that had lived or traveled to countries where such things exist, like Madagascar. These were legend and it was speculated that they started out as normal-sized roaches, but the food and other unmentionables washed behind the kennels had allowed them to grow to enormous, Mothra-like proportions. (EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY! GODZILLA IS APPROACHING!)


Okay, so we knew there were these tremendous cockroaches that roamed the behind-kennel area of the vet hospital. We heard that people – veterinarians even - were known to go the long way around to avoid it if they saw one down the hallway that had escaped its wet, slimy dungeon. It's not like you could step on one without having to do a major cleaning job on your shoes.

But we coexisted with them anyway-learned to turn the hose sprayer on "hard spray" to get them out of the way when we were cleaning behind the kennels. Avoid them, that is, when we could…

Well, one day I was in a rush, having traveled the 25 miles from vet tech school to get my four hours in cleaning the kennels. I went into my boss' office to change from my requisite tech school whites to my green cleaning scrubs. I put them on and went out into the hallway to start my job. All of a sudden I felt an itch on my inner thigh, so being alone in the hallway, I scratched it - and felt a lump. I SCREAMED as I shook my leg and out fell a cockroach as big as my palm, which righted itself and then went scuttling down the hall.

Of course I went back into my boss' office, took my scrubs off and turned them inside out, shook them about a thousand times, and then went to tell my colleagues. 10 years later, at a different job, in a different city, I still hear about "the day that roach was in your pants - ew"

And that's the truth.