This was originally going to be a repository for my "serious" writings, but I think it could be a lot more than that. I'm going to turn this into my "regular" blog where I write whatever stuff I feel like and post a story or poem every now and again.

I'll try to do one a day to keep honest, but I can't promise anything.

So, for today's post I figure I'll give you guys some recent history. About 2 years ago I went to the doctor for a regular checkup. It turns out that I had a pilonidal cyst (DO NOT GOOGLE) right below my tailbone. The doctor said it wasn't a serious medical condition, more of a quality of life situation. He gave me antibiotics and a method of keeping it under control. It didn't hurt or anything, it was just kind of awkward.

I developed a routine. Take a shower, get dressed, stuff paper towels down my pants to catch any "drainage" (again, DO NOT GOOGLE), go on with my day, take a shower, flush paper towels down the toilet, rinse, repeat (not really rinse, that would be gross {although I suppose I should be judging, what with the paper towels down my pants} [I really should stop making parenthetical jokes, but I can't. You'll have to deal with it]) For two years I did this. The first two years of my college life, no less. And it's not like you couldn't tell what was going on. I don't know if you could see it through my pants, but by the end of the day you could definitely smell it. It's a unique smell. I can't describe it. Sorry to everybody who had to smell it.

Towards the end of this school year it started to get worse. It became painful to sit down and the "drainage" got worse. Finally, a week before final exams, I had to go to the emergency room. They said it was one of the worst cases they had ever seen, but were surprised at the amount of pain I felt, or didn't feel. They said normally the patients they saw with a case half as bad as mine were crying and on pain killers.

I should back up a bit. I had been to a specialist a couple of times throughout the two years, but he didn't want to operate on me because the procedure he knew was painful and took two months to recover from. I was alright with this as long as it didn't hurt. Then, over winter break this year he told me about a new experimental procedure by a new doctor -- Matino -- that would have a recovery time of a week or so and didn't involve excising any skin. I made an appointment for the week after school got out in the spring. Back to the ER a month ago...

They put a bunch of gauze back there so I didn't bleed through my pants and told me to make an appointment with a doctor so I could get it fixed. I guess it got pretty severe. I also got to have a guy shove his finger up my butt for the first (and, for the foreseeable future, last) time that night. Not so fun.

I went to Matino, the new doctor, later that week and he took a peek. He exclaimed that I was one of the most severe cases he, a guy who worked solely on this kind of stuff, had ever seen. Great. He said he would like to try out his procedure on me. He explained that he would basically cut open a small flap of skin on my butt and clean it up. He would then inject some kind of dead person fluid (minus everything except some protein or something) into the flap and sew it back up. I wasn't too excited about this, but he said it had a higher success rate and a quicker recovery time than the old procedure, which was pretty much just digging out all of the area around the cyst, leaving you with a big whole at the top of your butt crack.

I scheduled the surgery for a week later and went home to watch movies.

Friday, the tenth of April, I went in to St. Joseph's in Manchester to get surgered. They thankfully gave me the option to get put all the way under, which I graciously accepted. I woke up about two hours later, laying on my back. I gather that they explained to me how the surgery went, but I don't remember much from that day.

Fast forwarding a bit to today. I went to see Dr. Matino for him to check up on me. He said that I was "infinitely better. Amazingly healed." I don't think he expected it to go as well as it did. Yay for me and him, right? So here I am, sitting (!) at my computer at nearly 1 in the morning and telling the whole internet how I had surgery on my butt. Gotta love the blog.

If you liked my take on whatever the hell I just wrote, please, come back the next time I write something. It probably won't be as gross, but I'm not going to make any promises.