I've heard it all my life. "Don't pick at zits, they'll scar and never heal up."
Well, during my first week at a new job I developed one of those under-the-skin-lumps that hurts like a mofo. They get red but never come to a head. They take weeks to go away. They are evil.
And no one on the face of the planet can resist trying to pop them.
I resisted. For two weeks, I washed it twice a day and put on antibiotic cream, let that soak in, then put on an acne cream that's part benzoyl peroxide and part salicylic acid. For TWO WEEKS I did this, and there was no change. It was there, it was painful, and it looked angry.
One evening while washing my face, I saw a little whitehead on the zit, so I gave it a gentle squeeze. A little pus came out. It hurt to squeeze more, so I finished washing my face, then did the nightly antibiotic cream/zit cream ritual.
The next morning, I woke up and noticed that the area wasn't painful. In fact, the lump seemed to be gone where the zit had been....
...and had been replaced by a quarter-sized "head" filled with nuclear-green goo.
For all the good I'd done babying it along, I might as well have been sticking a rusty spork in my head.
I looked at it and thought, well, I can't go to work with this thing on my head. I'm thirty-five years old, for Pete's sake! A band-aid won't work (it was right over my eyebrow). Makeup hasn't been invented that would cover the shade of nuclear chartreuse green that was on my head. So I did what any normal person would do.
I got an exacto knife, cleaned it with rubbing alcohol, cleaned the nuclear-zit-thing on my head, then sliced it open on the underside.
The alcohol stung, but the zit didn't hurt one bit. I squeezed out gobs of the most disgusting green gunk from this zit. I didn't want it coming back, so I put rubbing alcohol on q-tips and wiped out the inside of the zit.
After a bit, I was able to put makeup on and leave the house without my green glowing zit.
The irritating thing is, I had to open and de-gunk after work, and then the next morning and night again before the stupid thing stopped producting nuclear waste and started to heal.
I don't know what the hell was in there, but it was freaky!
