The Week from Hell

Last week started out great. It started in beautiful Nelson, British Columbia at the tail end of the Kootenay RAT (Riders Association of Triumph) Raid (rally). Met a lot of cool people and rode a lot of great rides. But something was nagging at me. A bump I’ve had on my back, between my left shoulder blade and my spine, for about 10 years was growing slightly and starting to hurt a bit.

The gist of the rest of this story is this: get your health problems sorted out before any big road trip. There’s not much more here about motorcycling.

Years ago I had asked my doctor in Denver about it and he said it was probably a fatty deposit and if it didn’t grow and it didn’t hurt or otherwise bother me, not to worry about it. Well, turns out he was very wrong. It’s a sebaceous cyst and it was now infected.

I made it home from Nelson on Monday, 423 miles in one shot. The cyst hurt bad enough that it woke me up at 4am Tuesday morning which prompted me to make an appointment with my current doctor for Wednesday. He properly diagnosed it but gave me antibiotics and sent me on my way. He didn’t want to remove it until the infection was gone. The cyst had other plans.

As an aside, this is probably one of THE MOST DISGUSTING, non-life-threatening ailments you can get. Middle of the week it started weeping a bit, forming a wretched-smelling crust on top. It seemed I was showering constantly and it still smelled. I couldn’t go anywhere unless there was a drive-thru.

Thursday I packed up my stuff once again, loaded up the bike and headed for Missoula, the first stop on the weekend trip to Idaho. My adventures in Missoula are detailed elsewhere. When I returned home Friday night the inside of my t-shirt was just coated with a 3″ diameter circle of crud over the cyst. It was in full-on leakage mode and it stank to high heaven. Fenske at one point asked me if I had broken wind. I said, “No, Dude, that’s the cyst.” He just kind of stared, incredulous.

Saturday rolls around and I had my mother come over to look at it. Naturally she has to poke and prod and stuff just start pouring out of the cyst. But the core won’t budge and it needed to be lanced – it can’t wait the month my doctor wanted. I wasn’t about to drain my Lumenos healthcare spending account going to the ER and my doctor’s office was closed, so we went to Helena Urgent Care.

This is where it gets good, and by good I mean ‘totally disgusting’.

This thing, this gigantic zit, was so ready to pop, just injecting the fluid for the anesthetic was enough to make it go. Thankfully I didn’t have to see it, but apparently were talking ounces of puss and “cheese” here. Then the doctor spent about an hour with tweezers digging around in the hole, pulling out fibrous bits and chunks of the wall of the cyst. As much of the wall needed to come out as possible to avoid a reappearance of the cyst in the future. Oh, did I mention that the great thing about red, swollen, infected skin is that you can’t deaden it? Not that he didn’t try with about a half-dozen shots of anesthetic.

They packed the hole with more than a yard of 1/2″ gauze and sent me on my merry way with a prescription for Lortab. That’s some good shit. I have to go back each day to get it repacked. Hopefully that will only have to happen a couple times.

So needless to say, the second-half of my vacation has sucked major ass.