(no subject)

[camwyn]

So the past few days I've had a little bit of itching going on at Downbelow Station, so to speak. Figured it might have been an issue with an ingrown hair or something, nothing too serious, so I just made a point of washing carefully and wearing cotton-lined undies. Today I actually looked down when I was in the can and saw a distinct swelling in the itch zone. Did some poking around on the Mayo Clinic's web site (I generally trust them to be less hysterical than WebMD) and came to the conclusion, based on symptoms and location, that it was probably a Bartholin's cyst. There's home treatments, the most prominent of which is 'sit in a really hot bath'. I plan on doing that tonight, but I also called the doctor and made an appointment to have it looked at tomorrow.

I then went over to the boss's office to tell him I needed to leave early for a doctor's appointment. He looked concerned, so I told him it wasn't that I wasn't feeling well, I'd just looked down when I was in the bathroom and realized I needed to have a doctor check it out. He nodded and said he'd probably been through the same thing.

I just left it at that.

Comments

[gramarye1971]

Yeah, those are not fun. They can go away by themselves, with the aforementioned hot bath/compress treatment (I recommend a hot water bottle, if you have one), but probably best to confirm it just to be sure that there's no actual infection.

[camwyn]

No hot water bottle, alas, but I do have a peas pack I got for a leg injury a while back. I'll probably warm that up and give it a try.

[in_the_blue]

Wow, I'd never heard of that diagnosis before so I went and looked it up. I bet your boss probably hasn't been through the same thing, bless his empathetic soul.

You could tell everyone it's a kayaking-related thing. Sports injuries (or sports-related medical stuff) make everyone look like heroes, if that idea floats your... well, I won't go there.

Good luck, hope the home remedy's all you need.

[camwyn]

Eh, I deliberately left it vague when I told him- it seemed safer to let him guess it was hemorrhoids or similar than to drop actual detailed info on the poor man. We'll see what they say tomorrow after a proper examination.

[derien]

Huh. I wonder if that's what I actually had which I called a boil. It's happened twice over my whole lifetime, and the first time was when I was a kid. Typical of a kid, I didn't notice it until it burst, and then it seemed GIGANTIC - and I told my Mom and she brushed it off, didn't look at the area, and didn't do anything at all about it that I recall. She might have sent me back to the bathroom with some peroxide.

[camwyn]

Yeah, this thing is- it looks like what I figure a boil looks like (I've never been entirely clear on the distinction between 'boil' and 'pimple that hasn't come to a head yet'. It's just positioned in such a location that I think it may be one of the cysts. I spent some time in a hot bath with it yesterday and then several rounds applying heated-up gel packs to the spot, but that doesn't seem to have changed anything this morning. There's only the one, and no sign of anything that I normally associate with pimples or boils, and no blistering, so... who knows. That's why I'm going to have it checked out.

[ymfaery]

..oh, is that what that's called? Learn something new.. :)