A doctor with OCD washes her hands while pondering the spread of disease. 3-4 minute dramatic monologue, good for women.
OCD
INT: A SMALL PREP ROOM NEAR THE OPERATING ROOM IN A HOSPITAL
DANA, a young doctor, is meticulously scrubbing her hands.
DANA
Ninety-nine…one hundred…
(Stops and braces herself against the sink, breathing hard. Someone walks by and she looks up and smiles)
Tell Dr. Collins that I'll be right in. I'm just washing up real fast.
(The person leaves and her smile drops. She looks down and realizes she's gripping the sink. She pulls her hands back with a gasp)
Damn! Have to start over…
(Starts washing her hands again, counting softly under her breath)
One…two…three…
Becoming a doctor was supposed to be the best thing for this. A whole building where everything was carefully sanitized and no one expected me to touch any part of their wet, mealy body without rolling that thin blue layer of protective gloves over my skin first.
I love the smell here, the scent of people and sickness and fetid breath steamrolled over and scrubbed clean with bright chemicals, cleaners, bleaches.
Twenty-five…twenty-six…twenty-seven…
But it's not just that, of course. It's people-cracked and raw and seeping. I was naïve-weren't we all-when I imagined that humanity was just steadily moving toward something. Some day when we'd eradicate every disease and germ and virus. I thought that's what I was working for.
Forty-eight…forty-nine…
It's brutal, biological warfare on both sides. I was reading an article the other day about how antibiotics are getting less and less effective every single day. Our greatest weapon and we're losing it from overuse. Staphylococcus is killing 25,000 people per year now who would have been fine a decade ago. I'm not safe here. I'm at the front lines.
Seventy-three…seventy-four…seventy-five…
If people would just wash their hands more instead of running to the damn antibacterial soap all the time, we might not be running through all our options so quickly. But we really don't have many of them anyway. Just a thin scrim of hope between us and 14th century Europe.
(A splash of soap flicks up into her eye and she raises the back of her hand to wipe it away. Pauses and looks down at her hands, mortified. After a moment she sighs and re-lathers her hands)
Okay, here we go. One…two…three…four…five…
