ETA: whatladder says this is a DO NOT EAT WHILE READING post. I say WALK IT OFF, PUSSY. You have been warned.
I went out to Calgary and I told the story so many times I don’t feel like telling it again! I went, it was fun, the end. You saw the pics, probably. “Critics Declare Buttcon 9 a Success.” Really, the most fun conference I have ever attended. Buttcon 10 is in Iceland, so I had better start saving up now.
I think what I want to talk about what a wreck my skin is. That’s more interesting anyhow. THIS IS MY HOUSE I’LL DO AS I DARN PLEASE. So, I have keratosis pilaris, and pretty much always have since I was a baby. When I was a kid, this affliction was known as “I don’t know why your skin does that, weird, huh?” I didn’t really realize what it was until I read about it on Tomato Nation, and I had that OH moment. The cool thing is that it starts clearing up between twenty-five and thirty, so my skin looks fine most of the time. But if something goes wrong now typically I can’t go, “Woe is moi I have skin affliction,” I have to say, this is a ZIT. Alas.
I have a history of just attacking myself, too. Years of fucked up skin combined with pretty good healing ability has made me somewhat fearless. I used to beg to pull my sister’s teeth when she was a kid and I would do home surgery on someone else in a second, if they let me. So my thing in more recent years has been what I guess are sebaceous cysts, where sometimes I will get a zit and it will just NOT go away.
My first experience was this monstrosity on my back, which was a zit that looked done and felt done, but would refill itself repeatedly. It got larger and larger and I could feel something lurking under my skin. So in the past year or so I got one in one of the worst places–under my BOOB. Right where my bra sits. I would prod it and I could feel something was in it…pirate’s booty? Spider eggs? Jeff Goldblum? Sorry, I am still running that into the ground from yesterday. It wasn’t funny then, either.
I was trapped in the hotel Saturday night with my sleepy kid, kind of bored and knocking around. Lewd texts I sent went ignored. TV was meh, as usual. But I had a pair of tweezers and a magnifying shaving mirror in the bathroom, and I noticed as I took my bra off it was sore again. Hmm…
It was a pretty easy operation as these things go, unlike the first time, which was on my back and very hard to reach. I could see the center and grabbed it after a few tries with my tweezers. What always sticks with me is the feeling of pulling some relatively hard object out of a hole in my body. I can feel it sliding out and then I have this THING that causes me sometimes a year-plus of irritation. I am the princess, and it is my pea. It is HEAVENLY having them come out, no joke.
Then I have the huge hole that goes down to forever and I am like CAN I SEE MY LUNGS through there? GRACIOUS. And it does not bleed. The next morning I woke up and it was a krillion times better, and today it is just a little scar. GO TEAM HOME SURGERY!
In Other News: FUCKING WHOOPS TIMES INFINITY
Franny: AUUUGH, Mom, what IS that at the top of your website???
Me: That. Is a wound. On a man’s. Leg.
Franny: That looks like a BAD one.
Me: Yes, but they sewed it up and he is okay now.
Franny: Okay, good.
FAIL!
I am totally a member of home team surgery. My story it too gross for your comments section, however. IMAGINE THAT
I’m right there with frannie. Your new header had been up for a couple of weeks before I really looked at it. Then I was all “flowers, chickens, eggs… wha?.. um.. OH!” You lulled me into a false sense of security!
I was lulled I tell you!
I too have KP and as I age, like a stinky rotten grape, I notice it gets better too. They say salicylic acid and/or sunshine makes it better but neither have proved true in my case. Anyhow, I too love home surgery and I adore sebaceous cysts. They are nasty fun. Check out popthatzit dot com for lots of them on video! :)
My husband had a big cyst on the top of his head and one, like you, under his boob. If he had a boob. Both were removed in the numbing safety of a doctor’s office, but you make me feel like we should just DIY surgery. Sounds fun! Next time…
Used to be the surgical assistant for a plastic surgeon, and we would sometimes remove cebacious cysts. They’re the hair follicle, so if you get them out just right w/the follicle too they won’t come back in the same place. Very satisfying amount of pus.
AnEmily: sometimes I feel lucky to have abused myself to the point where my immune system is superhuman wrt outside infections.
I totally understand the pulling something solid out of your body. I always felt like I’d accomplished something important.
Oh wow, so THAT’S what these weird bumps I’ve had on my arms since I was a little kid are…
I believe only nationalized health care would cause me to put up the X-acto knife and embroidery needle for home surgeries. (“Come here and let mommy get that splinter out. Grab that knife over there and my lighter..”)
I think we need real incentives to stop operating on ourselves and others. “COME IN, we has ice cream.”
Now I am thinking of that David Sedaris story in Barrel Fever where the father sets his daughter’s broken arm.
When I was a kid, one of the places we lived was this little itty bitty fishing village near Coos Bay, Oregon, called Charleston. We lived there when I was 5. And there is really really nothing to do in Charleston, so my sister and I used to go to the fishing docks to watch the big machines and steal fish while the fishermen were transferring their load to the packing plant. Thing is, I was originally from Eugene, where we were all hippies and ran around barefoot all the time, and it just never occurred to me what a bad idea it was to run around barefoot on a rotting dock made out of railroad ties and covered in fish guts. So one day my sister and I were running around trying to get an angle on a pallet of fish where neither the fisherman nor the forklift operator would be able to see us and I stepped on the dock while running and jammed a piece of wood from the dock all the way into my foot. It was such a big piece of wood and it was in there so deep that my sister actually had to break it loose from the dock before she could get me home.
So she helps me limp home, and I’m screaming and bleeding and leaving big bloody footprints on the dirt road between the docks and our house. Then she gets me into our little shack, which had a propane tank for the stove, but no electricity. And basically what happens in there is, my sister’s mom holds me down while my dad uses a razor blade, a pair of pliers, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of iodine, to remove the splinter — all by the light of a kerosene lamp.
I remember three things very clearly from that operation: pain, screaming, and my dad saying, “Hold still, goddamnit! If I don’t get this fucking thing out of here and get it cleaned out you’re gonna get fucking fish poisoning and lose the whole foot. Fuck! Ellen, give him something to bite down on.”
The splinter was the size of a pencil. My dad had to pretty much fillet my foot to get it out, then he cleaned the wound out with rubbing alcohol, taped it closed, cleaned the area around it with iodine, and put a clean sock over the whole mess. My foot swelled up, my leg swelled up, I got a fever, and then it cleared and the swelling went down. I don’t know if I was reacting to the fish guts or the creosote.
The whole experience made for useful fodder four years later when I was cleaning up some scrap lumber and accidentally got a rusty nail broken off in the base of my right index finger. I was throwing the lumber into a pile and the nail snagged in my finger, went all the way through, and broke off. I was home alone, and I went inside, pulled the nail out with a pair of pliers, got a mouthful of hydrogen peroxide, put my finger to my lips and blew the disinfectant through the hole. I was shaking so bad it took me a couple of tries to get it right, but the wound healed up pretty good.
And those are not all my home surgery stories, but they’re the ones I feel like telling today.
Ho my fucking pants Joshua you are made of sterner stuff than I.
Yeah. Joshua’s post left me literally biting my fingers in terror. Jeezus!
This is EXACTLY what I was hoping would happen. It is like JN bait.
Poor frannie. Being G’d at such a tender age. ;)