As anyone who’s seen my right thigh lately already knows, I’ve had an unsightly bump there for quite some time. I assumed it was either a cyst or a tumor. The center of the bump is a hard purplish nub. It’s surrounded by greenish and purplish skin, like a bruise. It started out small, then, as bodily abnormalities tend to do, it got bigger. About a month ago I realized the bump was the size of a golf ball. If you’ve never played golf before, it was the size of something you wouldn’t want in your thigh or anywhere else on your body.

Being fortunate enough to have health insurance, I really should’ve called a specialist months ago, before it had grown so much. But I never did. I’d actually gotten used to the bump. Once and a while I would touch it and it would discharge a clear liquid, which I took as its way of saying, “Don’t tell anyone about me, Ryan. I’m your little secret.”

Two weeks ago it started to become even bigger. The scabby nub had matured into an even darker purple. It was time to call a doctor. I dialed the number of what I thought was a general practitioner/family physician’s office. But when I went in for my appt. (that’s how doctors spell “appointment”) today, I saw that it was in fact a dermatologist’s office. What a goof. But no matter: The bump is on my skin, I thought, and “derma” means “skin” in Doctorspeak.

“What’s the problem?” the dermatologist asked. He was very friendly and bald and I think Spanish or Portuguese.

“I have a bump on my leg,” I said.

“Well, let’s see it.”

I pulled down my pants and rolled up the right half of my boxers and showed him the bump.

“Yes,” he said. “That is a bump. Lie down.” And I did.

“Is it a cyst?” I asked.

“Could be.”

“Could it be a tumor?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, almost laughing.

He asked if the bump had ever let out any blood or a milky or cheesy substance. I said no to both. “Just some clear liquid.”

“OK,” he said. “We’re gonna pop this thing. Are you afraid of needles?” he asked while unwrapping a medical needle.

“Not really,” I said. “Will it hurt?”

“Probably not,” he said, and stuck the needle deep into the bump causing a thick brown liquid to spew forth. There was a lot of it. It went down my leg and onto the examination bed. It looked precisely like gravy. If it were gravy, it would’ve been enough to coat a gentleman’s helping of turkey and mashed potatoes.

“You should lie all the way down with your head back,” he said. And I did. I suppose he didn’t want his patients to watch as evil flowed out of them.

He’d periodically poke different spots of the bump with his needle while squeezing it between his thumb and forefinger.

I was more or less speechless. What do you say to a man you just met whose draining the gravy out of your bump?

“So, what is it? Puss?” I eventually asked.

“It’s not puss, but I’m not exactly sure what it is. Could be some sort of lymphatic liquid.” He went on to say that that means fatty discharge. The once-white gauze he’d been using to soak up the ooze was now a Serena Williams brown. A portion of my boxers was covered with the stuff, which, as I write this two hours later, I can still feel.

Once he stopped poking and squeezing, he said we should schedule a biopsy to study the bump’s remnants, just to confirm it’s not anything serious. I said I’d be cool with that and I hopped off the bed and picked up my pants, all while making sure neither my sack nor tip was visible.

Tags: bump, cyst, derma, gravy

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 6:23 pm and is filed under The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.