Taking It on the Lump

It wasn't all that late on Saturday night, but I was on the trail end of a cold, I was tired and my head hurt. Sitting at the kitchen table in the darkness, I lit the evening's final cigarette and inhaled. As I sat there, cross-legged and barefoot on the kitchen chair, my hand drifted idly down to my left ankle. n Instead of the solid, distended, eyeball-sized lump of flesh that was growing just beneath my ankle bone?which is what I expected to find?I found myself touching something that was wet. The moment I touched it, a sharp pain drilled through my foot and up my leg.

Hmmm, I thought. I lodged the smoke in my craw and snapped on the lamp.

The lump was still there, as it almost always had been, but now there was something wrong with it. The tiny extension of the lump?a little arm or finger or antenna that stretched out from the base?had ruptured, somehow, and a small glob of grainy white pus was beginning to drip down the side of my foot.

"Well, I'll be damned," I mumbled, removing the cigarette and dropping it in the ashtray. "Now that's just plain grotesque." It was like having an eyeball-sized pimple on my foot.

With that in mind, I mashed down on it a bit with my thumb, to see if the whole ugly mass might just slide out nice and easy-like. It had worked with other, smaller cysts, but not this time, so I gave up trying. No need to make things worse than they already were.

(Although, come to think of it, that's what I usually do as a matter of course.)

In one form or another, the cyst has always been with me, but it had never been a burden until the summer of 1998. That's when it began to pulse and grow, transforming itself from a soft hillock of flesh to something that threatened to blink open at any moment. I came to think of it as my own personal Manster-in-the-making.

As it became more and more painful to get my shoes on in the morning, I finally relented and took it to a doctor, who sent me to another doctor, who snared me on a six-month treadmill worth of useless weekly appointments, culminating in a bit of (what should've been) minor surgery that turned far more complicated than it needed to be.

Still, when I finally left the hospital, the lump had been replaced with a jagged row of 10 stitches hidden by a surgical boot and a half-pound of bandages. I couldn't help but be reminded, with a mixture of sadness and horror, of the final line of an old Killdozer song about cyst removal: And my soul shall burn for the destruction of this little life!

I had nothing to worry about thataway, at least, as it seemed to be only a matter of weeks after the surgical boot and bandages came off that the Manster began its (his?) inevitable, inexorable return. By this past January, it was larger than it had been before the first surgery, and was only getting bigger. What's more, its color had changed from a pallid gray to bright fire-engine red. And it hurt, now, even to put socks on.

It wasn't a big deal, of course, not comparatively speaking. Just an annoyance. At any given tick of any of our lives, there's always some minor physical inconvenience we can focus on if we choose to?a hangnail, a headache, a sore back?or in this case, some sort of alien creature that was regenerating itself in my goddamned foot.

Finally, I called a doctor?a different one this time?no way in hell I was going to bring this thing back to the same man who blew it first time around with his bumbling antics. It was two nights before my appointment that it ruptured. Or at least its little arm did.

I trotted it into the bathroom, swabbed what I could of the leakage away, cleaned it up, smeared it with antibiotics and went to bed.

It might've been easier to lance it myself in the tub?especially with a little head-start like this?but that's my answer to most everything. And besides, I'd promised too many people too long ago that I wouldn't cut away any more unwanted parts of my body. At least not down on my feet, where the chances of my nicking an artery balanced out to about "inevitable."

I'd only seen this doctor a couple of times. He was what the HMO calls my "primary care physician." That means that during my first visit, he tried to lift my knees way up over my head, failed miserably, then sent me home after instructing me that I needed to start stretching. During my second visit, he told me that, no, my wrist wasn't broken, and sent me home again. The last time I was there, he just shrugged, smiled nervously and sent me home one more time.

Still, for some reason, I tended to trust him more than I did that charlatan who operated on me. Part of that had to do, I'm sure, with the fact that his office was a block and a half away from my apartment.

When I sat down in the waiting room this time, I found myself facing half the members of a local high school basketball team, all of whom were there, apparently, as part of some sort of team-wide checkup.

I set my bag on the floor, removed my hat and, as it was too dim in there for me to do anything else, stared at the floor. Whenever the secretary called me up to the front desk?either to sign in, or show her an insurance card or pay her?I heard the lot of them tittering behind me. It's been a while since teenagers have tittered at me behind my back. It brought back some cold memories, but I let it slide.

An hour and 15 minutes later, after a whole lot of floor-staring on my part, the doctor finally called me in. He's a young Asian fellow, always smiling and nodding. The red-and-white patch on the left breast of his white doctor's coat read "Pulmonary Specialist." I'd never seen a doctor announce his specialty in patch form before. Maybe he had dreams beyond simply giving insurance physicals to high school basketball players all day long. If so, I felt a little silly showing him something about as far away from the heart and lungs as you can get. Still, after asking me about the present status of my eyes and my seizures, he asked, "So what brings you in here today?"

"Well," I said, which is how I always begin with doctors, "it's like this..." I reached for my left shoe. I knew I'd only be allotted about six minutes or so, what with it being an HMO and all, so I had to talk fast.

He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, squatted down in front of me, grabbed my bare foot and gave it a hard, sharp twist to the right.

"Let me know if this is hurting you," he said. Then he gave it a hard twist the other way. Then he poked at the cyst for a few minutes while he asked me questions about the previous operation. I considered suggesting that he might not want to be poking at it so much, as he might make it mad. Instead, I answered his questions.

"He gave you a general?" he said with some surprise when I told him the last doctor had put me under to remove it.

"Yeah."

"Well that's not right. This is usually just done in an office, with a local."

"That's what I figured, see."

He looked and poked and twisted some more, thinking.

"Maybe he thought you'd try to help him," he said.

I let that one slide, too, as I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn't remember ever telling him about my earlier, drunken shoe-knife escapades. I had no reason to. Maybe he could just tell from that look in my eye, or my nervous demeanor.

"It's strange," he said, as he bent my foot forward and back. "You normally don't find sebaceous cysts down here. They usually only grow where there are hair follicles around."

Hmmmm, I thought.

"?and they usually don't come back after they've been removed."

All of this was feeding quite nicely into my Manster theory. A little...too nicely, if you ask me.

He stood up again.

"When it began oozing the other night, what came out."

I knew what he was looking for. "Well, it wasn't oily, it was?"

"?A cheesy substance, right? Did it smell bad?"

I grimaced slightly. Coming from Wisconsin, I really wish doctors would stop using the term "cheesy substance" in relation to noxious biological oozes. I also wish they'd stop reminding me that it "smelled bad."

I just nodded.

"Uh-huh," he said. "Okay. All that needs to be done is to have someone go in there and scoop it out?"

I really wish they'd stop using the phrase "scoop it out," too.

"?but I'm going to have to send you to a surgeon for that."

Oh Christ, here we go again. Another six-month ordeal.

He made a note on my chart, while asking absently, "Anything else bothering you today?"

"Well, now that you mention it," I told him, figuring I'd get the most out of my six minutes, "I also have this thing on my ass."