The demon barber of Fleet Street
posted in Illnesses, OmegaDad |I had, somewhere in the midst of my old collection of LPs, the Angela Lansbury/George Hearn Sweeney Todd production. It is a queasy-making musical, weird and fantastic and creepy and hair-raising…and full of quite hummable songs that talk about murder, violence, twisted lust, cannibalism, yadda, yadda, yadda.
One of these days I’m going to have to rent the Johnny Depp version.
So why discuss "the demon barber of Fleet Street"?
OmegaDad had a thing growing under his chin. It grew quite fast. We decided to send him off to the doc-in-a-box to get it checked out.
Dr. SledDog, the doc-in-a-box, shot him full of local anesthetic, whipped out his scalpel, and cut his throat.
Eeek!
Well, okay, not his throat, but the large goiterous mass under his chin.
And ever since OmegaDad came home with this humongous bandage under his chin, covering his beard, I have been humming "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" in my brain.
Grossitude ensued (really, this is a warning that you may not want to read the next bit): Dr. SledDog, when he shot him with the anesthetic, had to shoot him four or five times, because each time he plunged the plunger on the opposite side of the growth, the anesthetic went squirting back out the other side. When the growth was opened, some pus emerged, but Dr. SledDog had to reach inside with his scalpel and dig stuff out…which, apparently, was somewhat crystalline in make-up. Then Dr. SledDog packed the entire thing up with gauze, slapped the bandage on top, shot OmegaDad with a butt-load of antibiotics, and sent him home with instructions to come back this morning for a follow-up.
Amazingly enough, OmegaDotter listened to me when I requested she not bounce OmegaDad, and was quite gentle with him for the entire evening.
This morning, OmegaDad went in for his follow-up. He has returned, after having to have a CAT scan (?!). He needs to go back again to learn the results. It seems that there is more swelling and what-not that is not reachable, and Dr. SledDog needs to know what’s going on before plunging his straight razor scalpel back in and noodling around with it.
Many years ago, I had outpatient surgery to remove a cyst from my lower back. (This cyst is apparently a genetic thing; Great-Grandma had one there, and so does OmegaGranny. I didn’t know it at the time.) The docs who did it told me it would be a quick-and-easy thing, in, a few numbing shots, slice, remove, sewed back up, and out the door. Well, firstly, it was much bigger than they expected; a lot of it was subcutaneous. Secondly, since it was bigger than they expected, they kept running out of numb skin. That was fun. Not. So they ended up chasing the scalpel with more shots and digging further. Finally, when they got it out, the whole thing was about the size of my thumb. Ewww.
Anyway, gross description aside, the thing I remember most was just how much that "small" surgery took out of me. I was wasted for days; my feeling is that bodies are not made to be cut open on a whim, and doing it can send a finely-tuned collection of skin cells, nerve cells, hormones, chemical signaling pathways, and what-not into a great tizzy.
OmegaDad is feeling the same way. I’m just waiting for Dr. SledDog to sew him up, fer cryin’ out loud. And I’m really hoping that the CAT scan doesn’t show anything extraordinary, just more pus and where it is…and hoping that the antibiotics kick in and things calm down and OmegaDad can go to sleep at night, and then I can go to sleep at night.
