This is an email I sent to D-rock and several other friends a long time ago. And then I posted it as a blog entry on MySpace, but I never check MySpace anymore, so it's getting posted here now. And it's funny, so I am posting it here for all to read and enjoy. Feel free to make fun of me for it later on, I can take it. But be sort of nice at least. Please.
Disclaimer -- this is not for the faint of heart or easily grossed out.
True story circa 2005 or 2006. Enjoy.
C and I have been emailing back and forth all week last week and into this week because we each had a stubborn and gross pimple, and both were UGs,* because we both had PMS. C said at one point that she thought she had a skin disease that causes her to get zits the size of Mt Rushmore in her middle age, and that she had an additional medical condition that causes her to pick at them. She adamantly insists though that she didn't touch this one at all. She also added that she was a walking zit, and that she was a monster. So I replied to her: "I touched mine. I tried to cut it open because I couldn't pop it. Is that too much? Have I gone too far in telling you that?"
And that was true. The other night I tried to cut it open with a razor blade. Katie and I have always talked about it, and how we want to do that, how GREAT it would be, and if only we could just get a scalpel and get in there and cut the damn thing open we could then gently squeeze out the remaining pus pocket and then the UG would be gone and we could let the stupid thing start to heal finally, if only we could get the pus out. So I called Katie afterward to tell her about it too, because it was always sort of our dream, but it didn't work, and I needed to fill her in on it. She needed to know all the details. So I told her about how I made a series of cuts in a sunburst sort of a design from the center of the pimple, but that while it bled a little bit, I never got to the core of the problem. Katie thought that was just hilarious.
So anyway, in response to me telling C I had cut it open, she replied with the following: "I tried everything. I tried a warm/damp washcloth cuz I read in a magazine it makes the stuff come out and be ready to pop. I tried a cold pack to make the swelling go down and the redness go away. I tried a saylic (sp) acid zit cream and a benzoyl (sp) peroxide zit cream, then I poked at it. I tried hydrogen peroxide to dry it up. Now it's a disaster and I tried to cover it with makeup. The makeup looks bad but the zit uncovered looks 100 times worse." So I got an idea!!! (Note that she said that none of these things worked, but I didn't care!) I got an idea from C's email about what she had tried to do to get rid of her zit, and thought that if I tried a combo of hot water washcloth with a cold compress afterward that I could get rid of my pimple and alleviate the pain, pressure and swelling as well as the redness and pus-iness. Keep in mind that this pimple was right between my eyebrows, right in the middle of the bridge of my nose, and it was very painful, caused a lot of pressure on my sinuses, and was giving me headaches that kept me awake at night. I was beyond desperate. It hurt, and it was really red, swollen for about the entire area of my nose, and it was ugly. Ugly. U-G-L-Y. So Monday night I had had it, the zit had been there for about 6 days at that point, and the popping didn't work, the pimple medicine didn't work, tea tree oil didn't work, Burt's Bees Blemish stick didn't work, cutting it open with a razor blade didn't work, and scrubbing it with a facial loofah and an apricot facial scrub didn't work. Desperation had set in.
So I boiled water and then I poured it in a cup, thinking to myself that by the time the water got into the cup it wouldn't be hot enough anymore because the cup would cool it down too much, but I would try it anyway. I poured the water into the cup, waited about a minute so it wouldn't be boiling hot anymore, and then dipped the washcloth in the water and applied it to my pimple area, between my eyebrows and across the bridge of my nose. The washcloth felt hot, but it didn't feel like burning hot, just slightly uncomfortable hot, like when you first get into a shower hot. So I held it there for several minutes, re-dipping the washcloth here & there during the application for hotter water. Then I thought I should apply the cold compress, so I held a sock that I had filled with ice cubes on top of my nose for several more minutes, not because it was too hot and I thought I had burned myself, but just because that was what I had planned to do from the get-go. The original plan: apply hot water washcloth to make the zit poppable, then apply cold ice pack to reduce swelling and redness, and then within the hour be healed completely! Right?
So afterward, I removed the cold compress and I went to the mirror fully expecting to see that the pimple had been reduced to a little, easy-to-pop whitehead without any redness or swelling on the exterior, and that everything would be done, good and over with. Instead, when I looked in the mirror, it was pretty reddish all over, but no swelling or anything, and no whitehead. So I sort of rubbed the area where the pimple was so I could see it and try to pop it, and several layers of skin peeled off. I peeled off the top layer/layers of skin in the area, about 1" x 1 1/2" square total area, and then it started to weep. It continued to weep for the entire evening, and all through the night while I slept. I thought that over the course of the night it would stop weeping and it would slightly crust over to a nice sort of thin, brown, non-ugly scab, but it turned out that it got all yellow and pink and wet looking, and it was totally offensive and gross. So I woke up yesterday to get ready for school, took one look at myself in the mirror, and nearly started bawling. So I went back into the bedroom and told Jered I couldn't face anyone looking like this, so I didn't go to school. (I emailed my professors that I was missing school that day, but I didn't go into detail as to why. What was I going to say? I have a giant zit?)
Later on in the day I talked to my mom about it because she is a nurse and I was a little concerned about the weeping, and she said she needed to see it, which was the last thing I wanted because I really didn't want ANYONE to see me like that. I was hideous. So Jered and Anais and I went over there, and she said I HAD to go to the Dr, so I went to urgent care. I saw the doctor, and told him honestly what I had done, and he examined it, and diagnosed the problem. It turns out that I have a 3rd degree burn on my nose. Way to go me. I totally scalded the zit off. I guess in a way, mission accomplished. (?)
When I went to the doctor, well, first my mom called there because I don't have insurance, so she called and talked to one of the doctors, Dr. Cook in fact, whom she calls "Dave" or "Steve" or "Bob" or whatever his first name is. So she was on the phone with him at the clinic, and she said, "Hi _______ (insert correct familiar name here) This is Michelle. Well, my daughter did sort of a foolish thing..... yeah... (laughing) ....and anyway, could I send here over there and just have you take a look at her, you know, sort of on the sly.... yeah, well, she has a pretty bad burn on her face.... It was scalded.....no, she seems okay, just embarrassed... ok, I'll send her right over." So I go over there and tell the receptionist that Dr. Cook is expecting me, and he comes out to get me, and he was so so so so so nice to me right away, and he didn't laugh or make fun or treat me condescendingly at all, he just looked at it, said at one point that "this is a pretty severe burn" and at another point referred to it as a "very significant burn" and I told him the whole story of how it happened even though he didn't ask, and then he said, "well, it looks like you got rid of the pimple at least" and sort of laughed, but not like he was making fun of me at all, and then I told him I was concerned about scarring because it's on my face, and he was so nice and gave me an antibiotic cream for burns, like Bacetracin but better because Bacetracin also inhibits new skin growth (it sort of eats the new skin tissue in addition to the dead skin tissue) but this stuff will not inhibit new skin growth, which is what we want. So he said I can cover it all I want, and that I need to put on this cream once a day, and I can put it on twice a day if I want to, and that I need to wash the wound before I apply the cream so I can keep it clean and free of infection and also help control the 'S-scar" that forms over burns when skin has been removed like that, and the S-scar stuff is this thick yellow-ish oozing stuff that I thought was pus, but is not I guess. The yellow stuff forms a fake scab, and that prevents a real scab from forming, and we want a real scab to form so it can heal. So I have to keep trying to sort of clean off the fake scab stuff.
I need to own my own stupidity. Can you even believe this? Also, it's ok to laugh about it. It's funny. I give you permission to laugh about it. It's ok. Really. So laugh, and don't feel at all guilty for doing so. And tell anyone you want to, I can handle it, I won't be offended, it's stupid and funny and sort of pathetic and sad. And C sort of scolded me afterward, because I didn't seem to understand from her email that none of those things she listed worked, but I didn't care. Yes, I did understand from her email that none of those things worked, but I just thought that a warm washcloth would work if only it were a little hotter, so... well, you know the rest. I tend to do everything to extreme. Always. I was thinking maybe she didn't try hard enough.
Last night I had to clean it, and it didn't hurt to clean it, but it felt really weird, weird in a bad way, and I didn't like the feeling, and then I got really nauseous from the combination of the weird feeling and the look of it, because really, it looks really disgusting. I mean, that's the nature of burns. They're ugly. So I am totally The Man in the Iron Mask, or Quasimodo, or Freddy Kruger or some other hideous looking beast who should be kept locked up and under a mask. So anyway, I had to clean it last night, and I got really hot and faint and dizzy and nauseous, and somehow I made it through it, I mean I did a lazy job of cleaning it because of the nausea and everything, but it got mostly done anyway. So I am back at school today, and yes, it's still awful-looking. So I didn't go to school yesterday because of the grotesqueness of my appearance, but I am at school today. I thought that with burns you had to keep them exposed, that you couldn't cover them or they wouldn't heal. But when I went to the doctor, he said I definitely could cover it as much as I wanted to, and he said he suspected I would want to cover it frequently, and that was ok. So it is covered today. I am sure this is an amusing image to people who see me. I have a giant bandage across the middle of my face. I look like a domestic violence victim. No, I didn't get punched by my boyfriend, and no, I didn't get into a bar fight. I just tried to burn a zit off my face. Woo hoo - I rock!
So that's my little Wednesday story. I am a wreck. It's funny though.
* UG definition: Under Ground pimple, the kind that are under the surface and usually are really big and often hurt, and can't be popped. Gross.
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For the record, in case anyone is worried, my nose burn has healed quite well. It's scarred very slightly, but it's cool. And the zit is gone. For good. Praise the lord.
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