Posts Tagged ‘ tampons ’

Why Not to Flush Tampons Down Your Toilet

You know how there’s like this unwritten rule about flushing tampons? Well, I’ve always ignored it. Menstruation is disgusting enough without having to handle the bloody little devils after you haul them out. I wish they had little baggies you could put them in and then throw them away, because wrapping them up into a cocoon of toilet paper just seems wrong. (As though they’re going to metamorphize into something delicate and beautiful… HA!) I rebel against convention and flush them.

Well last week I was out adventuring in my yard, checking out my gardens and making a mental list of things that needed to be tidied up soon when I came across a strange and mysterious formation about half-way down my driveway.

From a distance it looked like a big purple ring on the dead, yellowed grass and it immediately drew my attention. I walked over to investigate and found that my septic system had been ill. Evidently its belly had been full and instead of shitting the debris out into the leach field, it had puked up its content all around my access shaft. What make the barf pile purple God only knows. Last time I checked, poo is brown and pee is yellow. This doesn’t seem likely to combine into purple. And, slap me on the wrist, but I don’t do enough laundry regularly to justify detergent being the cause.

Anyways, scattered throughout the purple ring were these puffy white things. At first I thought it was some sort of foam or concentration of bubbles, but bending down and poking through the piles with a stick told me otherwise. At first I couldn’t believe my eyes. The tampons were all white, all dry. I wondered to myself if I had accidentally dropped a box into the snow bank over the winter. That would have been plausible had there been applicators around as well. Nope.

It appears as though my septic system has been storing up tampons and for whatever reason, decided that it was going to expel mass quantities of them all at once. They didn’t come through a pipe, instead they erupted directly from under the soil and landed in a 5 or 6′ square foot area around what appears to be a broken access pipe.

I really don’t care if you think this is gross, deal with it in the name of Science! Learn from my mistake. Don’t flush your bloody mice! It will come back to haunt you. I’m just glad I got them cleaned up before the birds came back. Can you imagine how horrible it would have been if all the tweeties had spied that shiny white cotton? Every nest in the area would have been super plus absorbent. Ew!