Here's MY bodily terror:
Caution! If you get disgusted too easily, don't read!
[The exact disease from which I suffer is called hidradenitis suppurativa. If you want to find out more, Google on those words].
When I was 16, I suffered from acne. Both on my face and on my back. For some strange reason, I never fooled around with the zits on my face, so lo and behold, it was spared. (So today my face doesn't look like James Woods').
I wasn't so lucky with my back.
It turns out that the actual causes of cystic acne are in reality quite unknown. To make things worse, accutaine was not an option then, so as a teenager, I could only use homemade recipes to ease the frustration.
I tried everything: Iodine, ointments, vitamin a, ultraviolet rays, nothing. Nothing worked. Gradually, the regular acne started transforming into cystic acne, and instead of regular zits, I started getting full blown cysts the size of dimes and quarters.
The skin on the back is relatively thin, so the cysts go through their "bursting" cycle relatively quickly. The cysts form and expand in size until the wall support becomes insufficient to sustain a balanced gradient between the pressurized puss and the cyst walls, and then the cyst bursts.
So last year I decided to visit a plastic surgeon to remove some of them and then a dermatologist. Both of them were conclusive. My skin pores have some sort of genetic defect, and they have become "convoluted", as a result they get blocked by debris, cotton and dust. Since the smegma and sweat glands keep pumping stuff on a regular basis inside the pores, no matter how many baths I take per day, they keep blocking. When I asked them about the "prediction", they both said, "Not good", which essentially meant that "eventually, I will rot alive".
Lately, around 30 - 35, the polycystic acne started spreading to other parts of my body. I now have cysts all over, including genitals, butt cheeks and arm pits. Places that hurt the most, because they are full of glands. When a cyst forms on my armpits, my whole arm becomes swollen and almost disabled. When they form on my scrotum, the entire area becomes disabled, including the genitals themselves. When they form on my butt, I cannot sit, stand, sleep, eat, except swallow 4 advils every 2 hours and wait. Wait, until the cyst breaks.
I now have some standard equipment in my house to help me deal with the problem: Lots of disinfected needles and syringes and tincture iodine. When it comes, I prepare myself accordingly.
So here comes another one: On my left butt cheek. First, it's just a nuisance. I just feel the discomfort when I sit on chairs that don't have pillows.
Then it starts hurting, but I cannot really pierce it, because the cyst walls are not defined yet.
In about 3 -4 days time, the pain becomes intolerable, so I start taking advils. First one per two hours, then two per two hours, until I reach the limit of four per two hours. The brain starts producing endorphins on the side, sensing that something is really wrong.
Eventually, after a week of pain, the brain get completely drugged from a week's worth of advils and the endorphins. It starts malfunctioning. I just want to sleep. And not wake up. Unfortunately, I *do* wake up, and the feeling from waking up in this state, is probably worse than the actual pain from the cysts.
Gradually the pain becomes so strong that I start having thoughts of random violence.
So I get up, at 3:35 am and swallow the last 2 advils in the bottle. I smoke a couple of camels until they start taking effect, and make the final decision to once again go through with "the procedure". By now, the cyst on my butt cheek has a volume of almost 50 ccs. I can't walk even.
So I carefully disinfect the syringe, by plunging it into the iodine, doing the in-out routine for the hundredth time. Then, if I am really lucky, I can reach the cyst with one of my hands. It's easier if I can reach it with my right hand, but many times I can only reach it with the left. So I bite my lips, and feel the walls of the cyst, which now have a thickness of one inch. It's really hard to pierce through with the syringe, because they get thickened in order to accommodate the increased internal gradient and because every time I had sat on something, the cyst expanded internally, breaking the existent skin walls and allowing new ones to form at a greater radius. Except that the old walls never really go away, rather, they become part of the new expanded walls.
Then, the syringe goes in. I am reversing the sucking action every now and then, in order to find out if I've reached the cyst center. If I am lucky, the syringe dips in the first time. If I am not, I am just sucking empty air, cause the needle tip is in muscle. This last time I was lucky, even though I sucked through using my left hand. So I suck around 20ccs of puss out of it, take the needle out and empty it on the sink. Then I re-disinfect the syringe. Repeat as often as needed, until the cyst empties some. Again, if I am lucky and the cyst walls are not convoluted, I manage to empty the larger part. If not, I empty something like 40-60%.
I then head back to bead and pray that I don't wake up next morning. Unfortunately, I again wake up. "The procedure" will be repeated as often as needed.
The last one, last month, left a crater on my butt one inch in radius.
I tried accutaine two months ago, and my cholesterol shot up to 300 because of the damn drug. So accutaine is not an option anymore, because my liver will get shot, unless I go on a diabetic's diet, which is impossible.
As a last resort, I went to the hospital of venereal diseases here in Athens and they gave me some sort of antibiotic, which seems to be working. And I say "seems", because at least the puss does not stink of rot anymore and because once a cyst forms, it stays there forever, blocking itself over and over again through time, until the entire pore sack is removed surgically. Obviously, I cannot go once a week to a surgeon to remove every new cyst that forms. And judging from the doctors' predictions, it is clearly impossible to predict where a new cyst will form.
The long term prediction for hidradenitis suppurativa is not good. I will have to deal with this problem until I die. Well, such is life. One never knows what kind of card deal one gets.