...is a really fun word for a really gross nasty thing.
You should probably prepare yourself, because I'm about to tell you the grossest story I ever told. Its chock full of pain, embarrassment, blood, pus, and well, it's damn funny.
Shortly after Christmas, I noticed a curious pain in my tailbone. Like a deep sort of achy pain, like when you fall on the ice, or if someone wacks you in the ass with a cast iron pan and misses the fleshy bit. But I didn't have a bruise, so I shrugged it off.
Then a couple a days after that, the pain was getting worse and worse, and I discovered a little tiny pimple-like lump, right at the tipity top of my ass crack. Which is a most inconvenient place for a pimple to be, but I think we've all been there. Shrug and apricot scrub and sit more carefully. No big deal.
Except it was about to become a big deal. Like, a Great Masher Marble sized big deal.
And I thought what any interesting person would think, "OMG I am sprouting a tail!"
Suddenly, weird body quirks and years of odd medical ailments all made sense! My hyper-developed sense of smell, the chronic insomnia, my allergy to silver, my outrageous arm-hair, the lump in my ass-crack! Nothing was wrong with me at all! It was just really really slow-onset lycanthropy!
I was about to become a werewolf! With all the crazy demonic superpowers that that entailed! (Oh yeah, that pun was totally on purpose!) At least my dreams of super-villainy were about to be realized.
But then the lump was the size of a golf ball, and sitting was excruciating, and still no tail or fangs or anything! And then I had to do the worst thing that anybody ever had to do. I had to ask my mother (who is a nurse) for and Ass Inspection.
Oh, it was humiliating. And the one painful lump was becoming SEVERAL painful lumps, and who ever heard of a werewolf with like, 4 tails? That is completely unnecessary.
Well by new years eve, I couldn't sit at all without my legs tucked all up under me (it was a good thing we saw the Tale of Despereaux. Could you imagine me trying to get through Benjamin Button?) And so my mom took a look and she got all very serious and she said, "You need to see a doctor." And she told me some scary stuff about infections and traveling to the spine and yeah.
But I don't have health care and I'm kinda low on cash, so first we looked it up in a book and that's where we came up with the handy and catchy word "Carbuncle."
A Carbuncle is a painful circumscribed inflammation of the subcutaneous tissue, resulting in suppuration and sloughing, and having a tendency to spread somewhat like a boil, but more serious in its effects.
Which is a snooty way of saying an infection in my ass crack that would swell to the size of my fist, keep me couch-ridden on my stomach for the better part of a week, until finally it swelled so much, the skin split, upon which would follow days upon painful days of oozing bloody puss from the unmentionables, accompanied by high fever, body aches and general degradation and humiliation.
Which is exactly what happened. I DID wind up going to the doctor, after the first ones split and the new ones started sprouting and the prospect of another week in agony was too much to face. They put me on the wickedest and also expensivest antibiotics imaginable, and various friends doled out the percocets and hydrocodones for the pain. (Thanks ladies!)
Fortunately, I am finally on the mend. Yesterday, my fever broke, and I could finally sit on my own butt again! And as of this morning all oozing seems to have mercifully ceased.
And the next time I feel like I am at the height of degradation and misery, I will think of my mother, driving me to the doctor, saying, "I just, I just don't know how you got this. You weren't- were you... fooling around with somebody... back there?"
And I will laugh and laugh.
I'm still kinda bummed tho. About the tail.
Posts
