A Gross Story

Warning: This is a pointless anecdote with no deeper meaning. Don't waste your time reading this unless you are extremely bored. It's also kind of disgusting and further proves why I am weird.

So earlier this evening, I was in the kitchen petting my dog, when I felt this weird bump on his skin. Brushing his fur aside, I noticed a small hard bump surrounded by a ring of red, tender skin.

Now, for some reason this summer, I've suddenly developed a morbid fascination for skin conditions. Whether out of boredom or relieving stress from 24/7 studying of organic chemistry, this summer I've performed topical surgery on myself -- namely removing two very tiny darkened spots from my own hands. One of them, you can barely tell where I removed part of my own skin; the other is still noticeable but healing decently. Though both were most likely caused by sun exposure, I doubt either were cancerous or life-threatening -- I was just bored.

In any case, I'll take it as a sign that medicine still might be the proper path for me.

So anyways. I showed my mother, who was distracted by Youtube, the weird skin condition on my dog, and she said she'd seen it before. She advised me to not remove the weird pustule-like thing, because the last time she tried to do that my dog started bleeding. But per usual, I paid no attention to her and started poking around at the pustule-like bump. After a while, I went upstairs, grabbed my eyebrow tweezers from the bathroom, washed my hands like a surgeon readying herself for an operation, and then head back downstairs to my dog, who was still lounging lackadaisically on half of my mother's chair.

For some reason, my dog didn't pay much attention to me while I was admittedly messing around with him. At first, I only picked off part of the weird bump very minimally because I didn't want to hurt him. After a while, I realized he wasn't feeling anything or he didn't care, and so I started applying pressure more liberally. Soon, the bump was no longer elevated -- merely reduced to the same level but still noticeably embedded in the skin.

That's when I tried a technique that is also a bad habit I have with my zits -- I started squeezing the outer skin.

So it's been more than an hour since this operation, and the following image is still replaying nonstop in my head and making me shiver in disgust. Because once I started doing the "zit treatment" on my dog, shit started coming out of that pustule. Crusty orange-yellow shit that I imagine dried-pus would look like -- though I have never seen pus, so I don't know how helpful that description is. AND IT WOULDN'T STOP COMING OUT. Considering the size of the hole, I was like, "Damn, how much crud has been plugged up here??" It was scary, it was fascinating, and in retrospect, it was also kind of nasty.

(I was about to make an analogy to popping a pimple, but I decided this is weird and gross enough already.)

ANYWAYS. So finally, the shit stopped coming out. Now my dog has a hole in his skin that looked like somebody shoved a push-pin in and out of. All the nasty crud was disposed onto the latest Time magazine (the closest paper-like thing available) for further examination under a magnifying glass. My mother administered Vaseline on my dog's wound. Meanwhile, I did some googling and did not come to any real conclusion about what had infected my dog.

So in conclusion? Maybe I should consider being a dermatologist. Also, as I was typing this nasty thing, a spider about the size of a Gatorade bottle cap dangled down from the ceiling right next to me, causing me to scream out of shock. I don't like killing bugs, and I didn't scream because it was a spider but because it took me by surprise. So for all I know, that spider is still lurking around somewhere in my room. But I don't have to worry about it dropping down onto my face from the ceiling when I'm sleeping, because guess what? I now have an awesome leaf canopy over my bed, courtesy of the children's section of Ikea! Yeah, that's right.

Lesson of the day: Sophelia isn't weird. She's really really really weird. And kind of disgusting. And morbid. But you already knew that.