The Ass Cyst -

I feel like all the weird, unusual illnesses happen to me, just to shake my belief that I am a classy, elegant, got his shit together kind of guy. I feel like the universe likes to humiliate me every now and again just so I don’t get cocky. I know I talk about wanting to experience new things but maybe that was too vague for the universe. Cocktails on the edge of a volcano, I’m there. Swimming with dolphins in Hawaii, sign me up. A cyst in my arse crack, nah I’m happy to skip that. But no, the universe has other ideas. I have never been invited to cocktails at a volcano or swam with the dolphins in Hawaii, but I have had a cyst in my crack, not once, but twice. Yes, you read that correctly, twice I have developed a cyst in my beautiful booty. Apparently, it can be caused by excessive sweating. Hairy people are more prone to them because the bacteria enters the body through a hair follicle. Yes, gentle reader, my hairy sweaty butt hole is the prime breeding ground for bacteria that causes the most foul-smelling painful infections known to man.

It's called a pilonidal cyst. If, like me, you are always looking to drop a few pounds (life is not kind to tubby gay men. Honestly, gay men are judgy bitches) Google pilonidal cyst, you won't be able to face breakfast, lunch or dinner for a good couple of days after looking at the pictures. If you need to lose 5+ pounds, YouTube has videos of pilonidal cysts exploding. It will change your life and you will be bikini ready in no time.

Apparently pilonidal cysts are actually very common in hairy old people. If you are over 30, hirsute, and tend to sweat like a pig with minimal exertion, a pilonidal cyst may be in your future. I had never heard of them before I contracted one, and I hope to never see anyone in the hospital experiencing one because they are beyond painful.

Life can be cruel. Not only could I not have sex, I was in serious pain. Once they surgically drain the cyst, you are left with a large open wound that takes weeks to heal and needs to be packed daily. Look, I’m all for daily butt hole packing, but it seems quite cruel that I should have someone tinkering around down there every day without an orgasm in sight for me. They stuff that hole like a middle-American mom stuffing the Thanks-Giving turkey (the wound hole not the arsehole). So not only is the sex hole seeing no action, the smell of the puss weeping wound makes you react with revulsion to your very own arse. It is a very depressing time in a young man’s life.

So, a quick refresh, August 2017 the upper ass starts to hurt. A small lump starts to form, were talking coin size at this stage, like a twenty-cent piece. So, I wait a day, it enlarges to about a golf ball size and the pain starts to become unbearable. I see my local G.P, who gives me antibiotics and tells me to rest.

The next day I was admitted to emergency. Alarmingly I was immediately admitted and given heavy duty pain meds. I have turned up at hospital with breathing difficulties and not been seen so fast. It was clearly serious shit. The ER doc told me my G.P was a complete fuckwit and should have told me to present myself to emergency straight away. The only thing that eased my emotional pain at the disastrous turn of events was meeting the hot anaesthetist that was going to be sedating me for the surgery the next day.

Ten minutes before I was scheduled to be taken in for the surgery, my ass cyst exploded! I went to the bathroom to assess the damage. I pulled back the nappy that I was wearing (yes nappy) to reveal a gaping hole near my beloved hole. Brown sludge that stunk like dead fish, that had been chewed up by a dog, then thrown back up, and then had sat in the sun for a good 12 hours was gushing out of me. In the confined space of the bathroom the fumes overcame me and I fainted like an Elizabethan woman whose corset was too tight. Fainting really is counterproductive in terms of survival. Why the fuck would my body do something that would leave me lying there in my own foul-smelling bacteria riddled filth? Surely it would make more sense for me to fart and expel as much of the puss as possible with some solid anal sphincter expanding and contracting, but no I fainted and lolled about in it. The recovery took about three weeks. The endone was amazing and I basically just watched Netflix and ate, honestly other than the no sex and daily arse packing I couldn’t fault it. So, two months passed with no problems. I had a bum scar, not an awesome Harry Potter zigzag like I requested, but a scar that made me look like a dashing battle-scarred soldier. A soldier who went into battle bum first but a soldier all the same. I was now free to resume my sexual adventures, with the added bonus of an exotic and mysterious scar as an icebreaker and conversation starter.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t. I like to call what happened next ‘The cyst strikes back’. The first cyst was bad, the second one was like a competitive child determined to outdo their older sibling in every way. It was a ‘leave no doubt who’s the best’ kind of cyst. The cyst of the fucking century was growing on my arse. This cyst was like the mother fucking mothership in Independence Day, it just wouldn’t give up until it destroyed everything that I held dear. I took an Uber to the hospital where they drained it again. I was put on the waiting list for surgery to completely remove the pilonidal sinus. I was obviously outrageously vulnerable to cysts and it simply wasn’t sustainable for me to run off to the hospital every 3 months to have the monster in my arse temporarily defeated. My arse was declared a medical emergency, and 2 months later I had my pilonidal sinus removed. Luckily for me the surgery went well and I have been footloose and cyst free ever since.