Kara & Michael’s Blog

You know how so many people love to wax poetic about how amazing the human body is? These people have never had to have a boil lanced.

But let’s start at the beginning of yuck. Cysts tend to run in my family. No big deal. Most cysts are harmless and don’t really hurt. But let’s say, hypothetically, you have a cyst and it gets infected. Maybe you shrug it off, thinking, my body is totally amazing. It will take care of that for me.

Not so much. So 5 days later, when you have a tender golf ball on the side of your chest and you can’t breathe any more without your skin getting taut and pressing against the infection, you decide it may be time to go to the doctor.

I’ll spare you the description of the not-so-hypothetical lancing. Suffice it to say, it was gross and stinky and painful. I dare you to enter that exam room and say the human body is a wonderful thing. It is a complicated, tricky thing. But sometimes it is not so wonderful. Like when you’re at the pharmacy directly after the doctor’s office, waiting for an antibiotic and spewing pus and blood all over your shirts because the doctor didn’t put gauze on the wound but rather a pharmaceutical advertisement bandage.

So I’ve been at home since Thursday, slowly recovering. By recovering I mean drinking gallons of water, and sleeping with a hot compress on my side. I didn’t do much outside of getting up for water or to feed the cat. The swelling is nearly gone, but would you believe I’m still oozing? I’ve had an open wound now for longer than I’ve had the infection. Yes, bodies are wonderful. Bodies are wonderfully disgusting.