Here is a little short story for you to read. It will make you disgusted and question everything
you know about true love.
Abscess Makes The Heart Grow Fonder, The Ultimate Story of True Love
When people talk about diabetes and being overweight, they usually run down a standard checklist of ailments and afflictions that come along with the disease. It's all usually standard stuff, like being a sweaty mess of high sugars and low self-esteem, but little did you know there is a seedy underside to the life of the obese. A side nobody talks about. A side that lurks in the shadows of the hearts of men. These ailments are not for the faint of heart or weak of knee. These ailments are only talked about in hushed corners of society, in places so shameful that you can barely hear the whispering voices of those infected...
This is their story. A story of terror and fear.
My story opens like any other story. The day is born and I am awake. Rolling out of my king-sized bed, at the crack of Noon, I hit the head for the fifth time in 8 hours, cursing my overworked kidneys as I strain for release. After a quick assessment of the color and quality, the toilet flushes and I'm off to start my day.
I wash my hands, of course, I'm not a savage after all!
A quick breakfast of eggs & bacon, and I am on my way back to the oversized chair in my man cave. It's time for the standard morning fare of Ninja Turtles & teen angst drama. While sitting on the throne that hyperglycemia built, I notice a growing discomfort in my shorts. Not the standard growing discomfort in my shorts that is usual after repeat viewings of One Tree Hill, but a different, more sinister growing.
From beneath it devours...
After about three hours of increasing frustration and curiosity, I begin to think it might be worth checking out what's going on in the undercarriage area of my gym shorts. Swooping into the bathroom and ready to investigate what’s going on down there like a West Virginia miner, I immediately assume a position I can only guess was featured in a Madonna book. Like a Sumo wrestler without his diaper, I let the franks & beans fall where they may and begin to explore the area with vigor.
That's when I find it, or rather, it makes itself known to me. A pineapple-sized growth, red and glowing, like the eye of Sauron, protruding from between my thigh & groin region. I am shook & devastated. Unaware of what this new malady is, or how to confront it, I do what any knowledgeable man with a solid sense of shame does. Ignore it and hope it goes away!
This however does not last long.
Only hours into my day I sit shifting in my chair. Consumed by thoughts of cancer & infection, I turn to the only credible source I can think of, Web-MD. For those unfamiliar with the website, it's a place that irresponsible people & those without healthcare can go and self-diagnose, while building a healthy fear of whatever ailment is currently ravaging their body. Like all Web-MD posts, I wade through the first 8 pages of cancer this, and leukemia that, before I get to anything remotely resembling something I can psychologically handle. I investigate boils and lumps and skin conditions of all types and sizes, before I convince myself that this is simply an ingrown hair.
At this point, I've seen more infected skin than Lindsey Lohan's gynecologist, and am barely able to hold down food of any kind.
Onto my first dilemma. This is clearly a situation that requires a delicate touch, and is sadly, due to both location and size, a two-man job. This however involves making another human being aware of my, literally, growing problem. Who to tell? Who to trust with my Illuminati-like secret? Better yet, whose day do I ruin with the visual of my painfully red and throbbing infection? This is when a little voice in my head reminds me of those four special words every husband has heard. FOR BETTER OR WORSE. Well damn it, it couldn't really get any worse than this!
When those holiest of matrimonial words were written ages ago I can only imagine the scenarios assumed this would cover. None of which I’m sure involved an obese 350lb man, spread eagle on a silk sheet, with a flashlight in one hand, and a bottle of peroxide in the other, all while screaming, “Don't fucking touch it, just look!” and “I hope you found the tweezers!”
Immediately my wife suggested some form of medical help, but clearly, she had no idea that I already made up my mind, and self-treatment was the course this ship had taken. After a quick examination, it was determined that there was no real “head”, or place where a hair could have been ingrown. The redness and swelling were everywhere and not in a central location. I immediately tried to recall the less than pleasant pictures I had committed to memory while surfing the web earlier. OK, not ingrown hair, next let's think boil or staph infection, both common to diabetics, both treatable at home with the right amount of care.
After a quick bath in peroxide, which added some much-needed moisture to my already freezing balls, and seemingly defied gravity as it ran up the crack of my ass, we were ready to take the plunge, so to speak. The plunge in this case, was to make a small hole to allow whatever was growing in that area a way to escape.
This was a mistake. This was a mistake on a level that rivals New Coke. A mistake that rivals Spider-Man 3.
With one quick poke of a safety pin, my pain threshold, and innocence, were shattered forever. One sharp pierce of a needle, and 728 expletives later, I lay there emotionally crippled and bleeding from the groin. However, it did seem to be working at least in some fashion.
The swelling was going down, as the blood and pus oozed their way out of my body. For the next two days my wife & I would repeat this scenario, to varying degrees of success & cursing. As I grabbed the sides of my melon-sized growth and squeezed with all my might, my wife tried in vain to explain that 2 gallons of fluid trying to come out of the tiniest of pinpricks was not at all logical. What part of any of this is logical I demanded and continued to squeeze?
To make matters worse, all the manhandling had given that oh so sensitive area a nice deep purple bruise to go along with the inflammation and searing heat already present. This was not good. This was quickly escalating and getting out of hand, or more accurately getting out of our collective hands.
Days had now passed, the pineapple was now the size of a softball, but was hard and would bleed no more. The pain and throbbing had become so intense that walking, and even simple movements, had become problematic. While the redness had gone away, the bruising and swelling were ever-present and forced me to walk like I had been hit in the groin with an atomic fireball.
Then, the next morning two things changed the way I would treat this horror of an experience. First, I woke up covered in sweat, with a decent enough fever, and secondly, I woke up downstairs with no recollection of how I had negotiated the stairway, and distance, between the living room and my upstairs bedroom. This was finally worrisome. This was enough to see the doctor. The fear of some sort of systemic infection, or worse, had finally got the better of me and I gave up and made an appointment.
You might at this point be asking yourself why I was so adamant about not seeking help from a qualified medical professional. If so, then you've clearly never had to expose your obese genitals to a frightened nurse practitioner who must have later wished his day didn't start off with the inflamed groin area of an angry fat man. You are also possibly unaware of how they treat situations like this. Well, let me walk you through it. First, they inject you multiple times with a local anesthetic to “numb” the area. Now, I’ve already told you what one simple needle poke did to me earlier. The sheer thought of 5 or 6 of these needles going into my infected region was enough to make me weep openly.
However, the humiliation and pain do not stop there. They then cut into the tissue deep enough to release the pus & blood that is building up. When emptied, they then pack the wound with gauze and bandage the area. This requires you to return to the office, multiple times, to remove the saturated gauze and allow the medical team to place new, clean gauze in the wound until it starts to heal naturally. That’s right, this also involves exposing yourself repeatedly to whatever doctor & medical assistant combo has the luck to see you that day.
From pain to humiliation in 60 seconds.
That's what seeing the doctor was like. After speaking with the medical assistant and describing my condition, in Da Vinci Code like mystery, the guy finally comes into the room. As I'm shamefully laying on the table, manhood, dignity, and fat pockets pushed aside, he handles the area with the gentle touch of a grizzly bear. As he finishes his examination he looks me straight in the eye, I assume to feed off of the last remnants of my pride. He tells me that this is the biggest abscess he has ever witnessed and that it MUST be lanced and treated immediately in the ER.
Why he can't do it in the office, or why he can’t schedule a surgeon to do it, he does not explain. He simply shakes his head and offers his silent condolences. At this point, I inform him that I am aware of the medieval-like techniques they use in the hospital, not to mention the parade of doctors & nurses that will have to be exposed to my nether regions in the ER, and that there was a zero percent chance of that happening. After what I imagine was a quick consultation with another doctor, and a call to his insurance company to check liability, he agrees to try some hardcore antibiotics and prayer, and with his best wishes and about $100.00 worth of prescriptions, I am off again towards self-treatment.
I wish with all my heart that I could tell you this is the end of my story, that the antibiotics simply did their job and all is well below the belt. Sadly, this was not the case, not yet.
After starting my 10 day course of two different antibiotics, I also decided on two home remedies I had read about online. The first, an Epsom Salt bath, and the second, applying heat to the affected area. The warm salt bath was soothing to my already fractured nerves but appeared to only clean the general area the same way a shower would have. Of course, without subjecting me to play the game of "fat guy in a little tub".
Next, I was to apply my new heated pad, a cloth that is placed in the microwave until it's so hot touching it renders you without fingerprints, to the area. This caused two immediate reactions. First, I instantly knew what burning alive felt like, and secondly, my infection exploded in a Death Star like event. The heat it turns out brings everything to the surface, and the salt softens the skin allowing it to rupture, relatively pain-free. Feeling a slight trickle of warm wetness, I ask my poor wife to visually inspect the area one more time.
Now, you’d think that someone whose gender is familiar with bleeding from that area would be somewhat prepared for the visual she was about to receive, but you'd be wrong. The look of horror and disgust on her face has now replaced any signs of happiness she may have experienced, this decade! My shorts, groin & chair now looked like a crime scene. I had my own special victims unit in my pants, and even worse, it was far from over.
While helping me clean up the mess of steadily flowing blood & pus something changed in the atmosphere. A dark cloud descended from the heavens and began to hover in my man cave. I hope, for the sake of all those reading this, that you never have to experience what I can only describe as the smell of true shame and rot. A smell so putrid, rancid, and consuming, that holding your breath is the only option for survival. This mixture of infected blood and pus smelled like I imagine Rhianna does, and was, to make matters worse, the gift that kept on giving. My wife, a woman who worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant, has an iron stomach, and even she couldn't help but wretch and heave as the noxious waves of old dead blood hit is in the face with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
It flowed for 4 days straight, non-stop, and dirty. The only consolation I had was that the infected area itself was getting smaller by the hour and the pain had all but gone away.
Early on Day 1 of the drainage, my wife suggested that while I sleep I put a maxi-pad on the area, in order to take advantage of its super absorbent qualities. Now, if you were to assume I didn't have any dignity left, after poking it, draining it, having your wife investigate it, showing it to a disgusted doctor, and then needing help with the crime scene clean up, you would be wrong. The tiny shreds of manhood and self-respect I had left would not allow me to lie in bed, bleeding from my groin with a maxi-pad strapped to my bleeding crotch. That was a line I was not yet willing to cross.
Six rolls of toilet paper later, and multiple days of draining, the blood flow finally came to a stop, but the growth, now the size of a silver dollar was still there. Unbelievable! After losing buckets of blood and pus, there was still a growth left!
I had lost. The battle was over and I could go on no longer.
Then, by chance, or divine intervention, I read a post online, by some poor soul who suffered a similar situation. This writer suggested salting your crotch. That's right, packing a paste-like mixture of Epson Salt & water onto the growth and waiting for eruption one more time. Of course, because I’m smarter than the average bear, I tried it.
As my balls sat in 3 inches of salt, curing like the world's saddest, and most disgusting beef jerky, IT DID THE TRICK! The last of the fluid escaped my body, and the treatment, and antibiotics of course, had worked! I was finally free of infection and free to slowly gain my self-respect back! That is, until the next diabetes-related incident.
Why did I share this story with you?
To shock and awe? Maybe. To make you laugh? Possibly.
The real reason I wrote this, the truth behind the humor, is simple. I'm a guy. No different than hundreds, if not thousands, of other guys out there. This is how some of us think. This is how we suffer. This is our thought process and a manifestation of our fears and insecurities. This is what we deal with. These are afflictions that they don't talk about in regular diabetes education courses, but it is a reality for many diabetics.
Maybe you'll laugh. Maybe you'll find it revolting. My hope is that either way you will share this story with your friends & family, and maybe someone who is suffering in silence will have the courage to ask for some help and ruin their spouse's day as I did.