tagged together in 5 photos
ouch + infection
A couple months later, back in NYC, I got another one of these EXCEPT ON MY FACE and when I went to the doctor I found out it was a staph infection! Apparently, people always have staph bacteria under their skin, but somethings can cause it to infect a pore and then this happens. My doctor thinks I probably got it from diving in a bunch of wetsuits that weren't disinfected properly. Blech.
My mysterious side wound was getting hard and swollen and hurt pretty bad. While I was in our hotel's lobby checking out, I asked the owner, an older Thai gentleman, if he had any antibiotics (you can get them over the counter in Thailand) and showed him my inflamed, red side.
He got really excited when he saw the infection and started yelling out to the rest of his family (it was a family run business) to come and check it out. His wife and two teenage daughters surrounded me and after a brief inspection, whisked my shirt off right there in the lobby and started chattering excitedly in Thai.
While his two daughters giddily poked and prodded my side, miming the universal sign for "we're so going to pop that thing like a huge fucking zit," their father temporarily ran to get an Thai-English dictionary.
While I watched him thumb through the pages, I had to keep swatting away the long-nailed fingers of his two daughters who were getting bolder and bolder in their unauthorized attempts to squeeze the hard lump on my side. Eventually, their father found the entry he was looking for. He proudly spun the book around and pointed to a some Thai squiggles that translated into English as "PUSTULE."
"Pustule? Are you sure?" I asked him. "Yes, pustule!" He answered with a smile. "Now, my daughters will...", he paused while he looked up another word in his dictionary, "lance it!" I reluctantly agreed and the owner and his wife held my hands as his two daughters went to work on my side. After two or three minutes of serious work, I was covered in a sheen of sweat and tried to get the daughters to stop. They told me they were "almost to explode" and went back to work. Sure enough, about thirty seconds later, my side literally exploded and the whole family cheered as a giant wad of pus went everywhere.
The whole family then proceeded to clean my wound and dress it and sent me back to my hut to try to explain to Meredith what had just happened and why it took me 45 minutes to check out. Hahaha. Don't forget, this whole scene happened in THE LOBBY OF THEIR HOTEL while other guests wandered in and out horrified. Thailand rules. Here's a shot of my freshly lanced pustule.