branta

“The Boil” by Alden Nowlan

Am I alone
_______I wonder
in finding pleasure
in this,
____the thumb
and forefinger
rolling tight
________a corner of
the handkerchief,
_____________then
forcing the spear
of twisted cloth
___________under
the ripe core
of the boil
in my own flesh,
___________prying it
free,
__burning
the wound clean
with alcohol—
___________now
at last
____master
rather than
________servant
of the pain.

He had a huge abscess, it had been brewing for a week, he assumed, like all patients are doomed first to do, that it would just go away, but it was immense, it was red and swollen and angry, and I knew what I had to do, I drew up the epinephrine, knowing, as all doctors are doomed to know, that it will not kill the pain, and I injected the immense abscess, I filled it full, and blood spurted out the injection holes, but no pus, and I knew I was increasing the pressure, and I loaded the scalpel blade, and readied it over the abscess, and I remembered a former mentor of about a decade ago explaining that you should always make the first incision with the head at a far angle, in case the abscess explodes, so I put my head as far away as possible, and when the blade broke the skin the abscess exploded, and curdled pus went into my face, and the smell was that rancid smell that can only come with anaerobes, the distinctive whiff of abscess, and I felt like I needed to vomit, but first there was the shock of it, and then there was the revulsion of it, but there was a matter of professionalism, of being a doctor who had seen and done it all and who was unruffled, and I stuffed the vomit urge, and I milked out about 200 cc of puss, great gushes of it with each push, it took about five minutes to get all the pus out, and I stuck a forceps deep inside the abscess in case it was loculated and needed to be broken down, but all the pus was milked out, so I took about two metres of packing and shoved it in the abscess, and I dressed the wound and told the patient he’d need it looked at again in two days.

I left the room with pus on my face and went to the bathroom and washed my face with a towel, and I realized the smell was in here, that it hadn’t followed me in, the smell was throughout the entire clinic, the abscess smell spoiling every airspace, and I thought of Alden Nowlan’s poem about a manageable boil, about a zit under his control, and I thought of this abscess, far from control, asserting itself over me, taking every 2X4 in the clinic to staunch, coating me with itself, reminding me of itself, and I thought of the word “boil”, of how it suggests agitation, of how the very word intimates lack of control, and I thought of the word “abscess,” derived from the Latin abscedere, “ab” for “away” and “cedere” for “to go” which suggests the humours leaving the body through the portal of the abscess, and how boil is the better name, how poetry is an assertion of mastery on unruly elements, and how this abscess, this boil, will take weeks to heal.