“Well that’s really interesting,” the specialist says peering into the hole he’s just drilled in the side of my head. “Really interesting good or really interesting bad?” I ask. “Hard to tell,” he says.
“But there appears to be something stuck in there. I’m going in. This might hurt a bit.
” * A few months ago I was running my fingers through my hair and encountered a slight swelling, a nascent nub. A small lump on my left temple. It didn’t hurt, and was slightly scaly and hard to the touch.
I liked the scaliness. I enjoyed scraping at it idly with a fingernail while I watched television or trawled the internet. It was very satisfying.
Pleasurable even. But I do have a thing. A proper diagnosed condition.
A compulsion colloquially known as ‘face picking’. One of the OCDs. So it was very much an extension of that.
Scrape, scrape, scrape. Finger nail against flaky bone hard skin. Initially I expected one day to lift off the entire scab, lump and all with the edge of my finger nail and it would be gone, leaving just a wet, slightly sticky spot where it had once been.
But instead it started to get bigger. Each day just a little more pronounced, and looking more like a horn bud than the pimple, mole or wart it could have been. “You should go to the doctor.
It could be brain cancer,” my mother the hypochondriac says jealously. “What the fuck is that? That’s so gross,” my boyfriend who is already in the process of leaving me says, clearly repulse.
