Day 6: Ugh.

I’m on day 6 of my bacterial invasion, and I have to say this is the most disgusting illness I have ever had. It’s also one of the most painful — during the worst days, I could tell time by when my teeth started to ache again (“hey, it’s been 3 1/2 hours since I took my last Advil!”)

Warning: Gross-out ahead. I’m documenting this in case I have another skin abscess or in case you get one (so you know what to expect.) This is nasty, so don’t read it if you think snot is gross.

Sooo… for those of you who have never had these, let me explain a little. This is kind of like having a cold, except instead of snot coming out of your nose, it builds up in your body tissues and causes nasty swelling. Then a nasty sore somewhere on your skin comes to a head and starts to…well…ooze. (This is where it gets gross.) The oozing isn’t painful per se; it’s just that you start to realize how much snot your body made, and how long it is gonna take to ooze out of the inside of your nose–or wherever your skin abscess is. (Are you grossed out yet? It only gets better from here.)

So my body apparently decided yesterday that all that stuff was just going to have to come out faster than oozing up through my nose would let it. I had figured out that putting my head down would let it ooze faster, and I did go through about 100 Q-tips trying to get the stuff out of my nose, but my body was working against gravity.

I went to San Francisco yesterday. I was feeling marginally better and needed to get out of the house. While driving on the freeway, I happened to glance in the rearview mirror and I noticed a glob on my lower lip. Confused, I slowed down and tried to figure out where this had come from. It obviously hadn’t come from my nose; I would have felt it. I peeled back my swollen upper lip to find out that my body had conveniently decided that one oozing skin abscess wasn’t enough, and had decided to locate another one on the inside of my upper lip. And, as if that weren’t bad enough, since gravity was working in its favor, it was dripping onto my lower lip.

Once I got to San Francisco, I parked and sat there in the car for about 15 minutes squeezing the gunk out. I went through about 10 Kleenex and several more Q-tips. The gunk looks exactly like the stuff that comes out of your nose in a cold, except not lumpy. I have never seen so much ooze in my life. Those of you who saw me recently remember that my upper lip and right side of my face were quite swollen; well, that’s what they were filled with, and that’s what I was squeezing out.

I got it all squeezed out and I immediately began to notice that the swelling on my lip was dropping. Now, almost 24 hours later, it looks mostly normal. (I still can’t smile, but I should be able to in a couple days.) Assuming the inside-my-upper-lip abscess does not become further infected, it looks like it was a blessing in disguise. My body did what it needed to do to get the gunk out. Even better news was that this solved the toothache, and I no longer needed to take Advil every 4 hours.

There you have it…the gross-out story of my adult life, blogged for the world to see. I wish I could tell you how to avoid something like this, but even the doctor couldn’t tell me how it happened. The bacteria that cause this live happily inside everyone’s body, and sometimes some people’s bodies stage a revolt, and then Ooze Happens. The only advice I got that might work is to 1) not rub your eyes (that’s probably what caused my stye and started the revolt back in January); 2) if you have an open sore or a scratch, don’t pick at it or rub it, because that will drive bacteria into it; and 3) either don’t use eye makeup or be really careful with it (as George said on the comments in my last blog, throw it away every few months.) 2) and 3) don’t really apply to me, but they do apply as general advice to avoid the Ooze.