7.14: Gentle impulsion
Scrivener July 17th, 2008
196/366
When I was little, like maybe 7 or so, I was playing in the backyard with an icepick–it was a machete that I was using to clear a trail through the jungle that I had imagined from a few vines growing on the fence. Somehow, I ended up stabbing myself in the thigh with the icepick. I remember it in my leg, and looking at it thinking that I had seriously injured myself, but I grabbed onto it and yanked it out and nothing happened. It didn’t really hurt and it didn’t bleed at all. So I went and put the icepick in the sink and never said anything to anyone about it because I didn’t want to get in trouble for being stupid enough to be playing with an icepick.
Then 15 years later, while I was in grad school, I had this really sore spot on my thigh that felt like an ingrown hair, except it was there for a really long time. After a couple of months, when I thought it felt like it was getting bigger and it had gotten to be really painful, I went to the health center to have it checked out and the doctor told me it was just an ingrown hair and sent me home. A month later, I came back again and saw a different doctor who said it was probably just some sort of infection and he could give me antibiotics for it, which I resisted, so he referred me to a dermatologist, who said it was probably an infection but that she should cut it out and biopsy it just in case. So she did and when the results came back from the lab, she told me it was a piece of metal in my leg. And suddenly I remembered the incident with the icepick and figured that the tip broke off in my leg and had been slowly working its way out ever since.
that’s amazing.
Oh, wow - 15 years!
So the piece of metal was in the tissue for the biopsy? That’s one way to get out a “sliver.”
A.
yikes. glad it tried to get out rather than farther in.
gnarly! isn’t the human body an amazing thing? (and i love your surreptitious replacement of the ice pick and subsequent silence.
)
Yes, the metal was in the biopsy tissue. At least it was definitively not cancerous. I think there’s a pretty good metaphor in that whole episode–the injury, the lingering evidence of the wound buried deeply enough that it was unnoticeable, its subsequent working to the surface and causing pain, and then dealing with it and moving on.
I did the same thing after accidentally cutting my wrist with a purloined penknife that I was using to carve up a refrigerator box clubhouse. I hid behind the bed until I got the bleeding stopped (tube socks are surprisingly absorbent) and then I put the knife back and carried on, ho hum. I still have an interesting scar.
Great story, and great metaphor.