TIFU by popping a zit

Obligatory 'didn't happen today' here.

This happened about 3 years ago, near Christmas time.

I was visiting my mom for Christmas in 2017, with my ex (then SO at the time), and in the middle of a game of Wii Bowling, felt a little itch on my left eyebrow. Two minutes later, I'm sitting on the bathroom counter, staring into the mirror with a bobby pin against my eyebrow, trying to pop the zit that had developed on my left eyebrow.

Two *more* minutes later, I was back in the living room playing Wii Bowling with the rest of the family, in between chatting with a few friends online.

We head over to my then-stepdad's family's place later that day. My face, meanwhile, has been growing more and more itchy. Thinking it's just allergies, I take some Benadryl and continue.

Big. Mistake.

The Benadryl slowed the itching, bringing it down to a manageable state. So, we went home and started preparations for the next day (Christmas Eve).

Fast forward a couple of hours. It's now about 11 PM, December 23rd, and my face is both numb and on *fire*. I open my eyes, and find that I'm only able to open my left eye about half way. So, I wake up my SO and my mother, and we book it to the hospital.

In the light, we can clearly see what's wrong. My left eye is quickly swelling shut, the skin around it growing angry red and about the size of a softball. By the time we've arrived at the hospital, it's spread to my forehead and it hurts to do much of anything, including struggle to keep my eyes open. I've been chatting with a few friends at this point, and all of them are afraid it might be some sort of allergic reaction (I'm allergic to nearly every plant under the sun).

It takes 3 - 4 hours before we're able to be seen, and the doctor doesn't know what the hell is wrong with me. So they do the usual repertoire: blood work, piss test, MRI, X-ray, all to see if it might reveal something.

Spoiler: It doesn't.

Another hour passes before a specialist arrives, who sits down with me and runs some basic tests:

* "Try to open your eyes."
* "Can you force it open?"
* "Does this hurt?" (Pressing on my swollen eyelid and forehead)

Eventually, he determines it's something called preseptic periorbital cellulitis. In layman's terms, that's an infection of the tissue around the eye that has yet to reach the bloodstream or the ocular nerves.

All good, right?

Nope.

I have to get a shot. In my *ass*. It's steroids, they say, to help speed recovery. Then they prescribe me Bactrim and Cephalexin, two antibiotics that are commonplace treatment for *Streptococcus pyogenes,* the *same bacteria that causes strep throat*.

So yeah. It took about 4-6 days before the swelling went down enough for me to see, and I had to sleep sitting upright until then (I sleep on my stomach). To make things worse, once the swelling went down, in comes the pus.

Pus is nasty enough by itself, no? Well, it's even nastier when you have an entire softball's worth of pus in your face, and you have to push it all out of a hole in your eyebrow no bigger than the tip of a ballpoint pen. The amount of pus-soaked baby wipes I went through, combined with the amount of screaming from the pain I was in, is enough to make me wish I never have that damned infection again.

​

TL;DR: Popping a zit led to getting a seriously nasty infection, making my face swell up. On *Christmas*.

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