Butt Boil

it's hot. i'm mildly nauseous from taking naproxen sodium. my big goal for today is to get the boil at the top of my ass cleft to drain. this is another of my gross and offensive posts. if that bothers you, get lost before the bloody, pus-filled horrors begin.

over christmas break in 1997, when some people were still using the mosaic web browser and dial up connections were all the rage, i noticed that my lower back hurt whenever i sat on my parents' ancient, poodle-funk-scented couch. there's not much to do in oak ridge, tennessee other than sit on my ass. the scenery can change, of course. i could sit on my ass at a chain restaurant, a movie theater, or in front of my parents' television. at the time, i thought the pain was due to the marathon of ass-sitting.

the pain never got worse than a dull ache. it suddenly disappeared while my brother and i were driving back to the northeast. we stopped at a rest stop and i noticed some nasty-smelling, bloody pus on the waistband of my underwear. after some serious freak-outage where i imagined myself as a medieval leper, or perhaps a bubonic plague sufferer, i realized that this was the tell-tale sign of a draining boil. it was the first time i'd ever had the ill luck to suffer from one of the nasty things, but there's a first time for everything. i bought some neosporin and gauze pads to speed along the healing process, and everything was peachy keen within a day.

fast forward 6 months, and i got a familiar twinge in my lower back. because the first boil came and went so quickly, i thought nothing of it. i washed the area and proceeded with my normal activities, but the damn thing just wouldn't drain. after a couple of days, it hurt to both sit and walk. just as i was about to break down and go to university health services so that a doctor and some unknown number of medical students could take a gander at my ass sore, the boil began to drain.

let me put it this way -- it was completely and utterly disgusting. more disgusting than shit. shit is a familiar, every-day by-product of the body. foul-smelling, yellow-brown, oozing bloody pus coming out the top of one's ass crack is most definitely not. so, again, i applied neosporin and gauze pads. i figured that since i was not running a fever and the pain was much relieved by the bursting of the boil, i did not need to show my ass to members of the medical profession. within two days, it was mostly healed, even if it was a bit itchy from the growth of new skin and all.

years passed and the ass-crack affliction did not return. occasionally, it would get mildly irritated in hot, steamy weather, but never did it become infected. so, seven years later, the boil decides to return. by this time, the internet has matured enough that a quick google search gave me a name for the condition in which one develops periodic boils at the top of one's ass cleft -- pilonidal disease. some doctors speculate that it is a birth defect due to late regression of a fetal 'tail' apparent in some sonograms of 14-16 week old fetuses.

frankly, given the choice between the prehensile tail of my ancestors and a chronic skin infection at the top of my ass crack, i'd totally have chosen the tail. now, i am contemplating surgery to resolve this little condition. however, estimated success rates (judging from my extensive googling on the subject) range from 50% to 90%. the estimated recovery period ranges from 2 weeks to 2 months. meanwhile, someone has to clean and pack an open wound on my ass several times a day.

now, if the success rate is 90%, i'd be willing to sacrifice my winter break to have this ass boil problem removed. 50%.... eh, not so much. choices, choices.