Gunk, pus, goo, slime, mucus, general yuck and disgust. All so strangely satisfying to squeeze out of the body!
Some days have a certain theme to the patients who come to the Dispensary, and today it was about squeezing, draining, wiping, sucking and otherwise removing extraneous gunk from their bodies. Without getting too much of it over myself.
There seem to be some rather nasty bushes with thorns around Shela. I have now seen three men with very swollen fingers or limbs from close encounters with them. You might remember one of these patients: the old farmer with the hugely swollen leg from ignoring the thorn scrape for a month – he is slowly getting better, remembering to come see me most (but not all) days to have his dressings changed. He is trying to teach me Swahili but gives me so many new words at once that I only remember one or two. Kofia = Hat (which he likes to bite when I cause his leg pain).
I had a morbidly satisfying 30 minutes this morning slowly squeezing a very large amount of pus out of a young man’s thorn-punctured finger. He turned up with some herbal concoction on it that I mistook for being his skin (to his delight!) and my face must have looked quite funny… It was his turn to grimace though as I used all the strength in my thumbs from doing a LOT of massage recently to get the infection out through the hole at the tip of his finger. He was a very good sport however – and cheekily asked for a hand and arm massage afterwards to make him feel better!
Then a middle-aged patient arrived with a very impressive ganglion on the back of his wrist, not looking all that dissimilar to a golf ball that had somehow been stuffed under his skin! The old-fashioned treatment would have been to smack it with a Bible (or maybe a Quoran given the high percentage of Muslims in Shela), but I found it infinitely more satisfying -and safe for his wrist bones- to puncture the ganglion with the biggest gauge injection needle I could find and squeeze out all the transparent jelly-like substance that had accumulated around his tendon. First I tried to suck it out with a syringe, but it was so thick and viscous that only massage-primed thumbs could get it moving. Oooooh, how satisfying! It flowed and flowed and flowed, and both the patient and I watched with fascination. How did all of that get in there?!
Some clean dressings, appropriate painkiller and antibiotic management later, I sent each of them on their way with smiles on their faces from this “instant cure”.
It’s days like today where it occurs to me that being a surgeon must be a very satisfying job indeed. No need for much diagnostic finesse, emotional availability or spiritual guidance. Just some deft handiwork and no fear of mess during the procedure. I wonder if Pus-Squeezology is a possibility for surgical sub-specialisation…
