I noticed this protrusion on my stomach the other day; a triple threat of a couple of ingrown hairs and a pimple, all nestled in the soft flesh of a stretch mark.
A pimple is usually not such a big deal for me, my back already makes me look like an alien queen, just dotted with translucent eggs housing embryonic ingrown hairs and feeding sacs of milky white pus
But this thing was sticking out of me, and it was quite delicate. The simple act of my shirt rubbing against it was enough to feel a faint sting on my stomach.
Usually the best thing to do with a pimple is just leave it, but if you must do something, experts recommend stabbing it with a pin. However, you’ve got to heat it up first to sterilise it, otherwise you’re just giving yourself a hypodermic shot of bacteria.
So I grabbed a pin, heated it up, and jabbed it in there. I dug around a bit to make sure I’d gotten in, and gave it a squeeze.
A dollop of blood infused pus about the size of a pinhead bloomed out of my stomach- strawberries and cream if you will
But the raised mound of the pimple was still sticking up out of me. I may have stabbed the top, but there seemed to be a reservoir further in
So I’m holding on to the pin, scratching around in this divot in my own gut I’ve created, performing a bit of exploratory surgery to see how far I can get in there, in the hopes I can find another pocket of pus before I start hitting nerve endings
One thing I noticed was this hair, just floating around in my new concave meat ditch. It was tethered in place by a single strand of skin, the follicle must have been just stewing in pus before I popped that pimple.
So I just pulled it out of me. There was no plucking, no resistance, the follicle had nothing to hold on to.
With the hair removed I had better access to the flap of skin that used to form the external membrane of the pimple, and whilst it didn’t do much, I could slot the pin under the flap and tug at it, sort of forming a flesh tent on my stomach in better hopes of seeing what was in there.
There was another, smaller head on this raised mound, but being in the soft flesh of the stretch mark meant it would sink in and disappear when I stabbed at it
So I thought, maybe I can chip away at a dermal layer under this skin flap, and work towards this pus deposit from an angle.
Sort of like playing Minecraft from the inside.
But alas, that didn’t work either, the skin was too soft to get angles right and stab in the right direction.
If the rest of the pimple wanted to come out and play, it will do so in its own time. I gave my perforation a final squeeze, just all red this time, gave it a wipe, put my pyjamas on, and went to bed.
It was at some point that night I learned what an error in judgement that was.
I woke up in the middle of the night, something pulling at my chest, with a sharp pain on my gut, not in it, like a stomach problem, but in top of it.
When I went back into the bathroom and turned the light on, I saw what I had done.
In the night, a viscous discharge secreted from my wound, bound itself to my shirt, and dried. There was a large splotch on my chest where the pimple had been, and a line running across my body, from when I was sleeping on my side.
I was now in quite the predicament:
My shirt had effectively formed a giant bandage that caused too much discomfort to keep on, tugging at my skin and pinching by yanking at hairs would every pulling them out
But removing my shirt would rip out all the attached hair, and reopen the wound that stuck to them in the first place
I didn’t want to take my shirt off, but I couldn’t get back to sleep with it on, so I decided to rip it off like the bandage it had become.
I grabbed opposite sides of my shirt with my hands and ripped it off, trying not slow down when I felt the resistance of the dried wound, or the hair being plucked from my stomach.
My girlfriend was sleeping, so I internalised my screams, and it had been some hours since I dig around in myself, so I decided to give it another pass.
I squeezed at my stomach to see what I could force up now.
All I could muster was another pinhead globule of blood, but I felt something hard and unyielding in there, something that wasn’t there before, that must have sat deeper within me during my first expedition.
So I reached for the pin, ran it under hot water again, and jammed it back in the hole. I could feel it roll around to the periphery of something solid in the burrow that once housed my pimple.
I managed to get the pub to one side of it and do this flick/scooping motion to eventually dig it out of me.
What I peeled out of my last layers of skin, at first looked like a seed. It was solid, black, with both the size and shrivelled exterior of a peppercorn.
An electric shiver ran down my spine at the thought my own body produced something like this.
There was already a bulb of gelatinous plasma discharged from the peppercorn’s cavern, and so I had more pressing things to worry about.
I discarded the peppercorn with a flick and some tink-tink ricochets in the sink.
I got a sticking plaster from its box and stuck it over the hole, I figured it could act as a buffer against my shirt until the pimple had healed over.
The bandage stayed on for weeks.
It held fast with no sign of letting go, even after several showers. An earthy brown spot grew behind the bandage, eventually taking up its entire surface area as the days wore on
Towards the end I figured all the adhesive on the bandage was long gone, and what was holding it in place was actually my dried, caked and cracked bodily fluids.
But when the bandage finally fell, the pimple was completely healed and my stomach was back to its regular arc again.
However, now I can feel a sharp stabbing pain between my shoulder blades when I move my arms back.
I think I’ll get my girlfriend to have a look.