I want to give a character of mine a wound infection on his leg. Something severe enough to raise the stakes, but not lethal. Something that would be interesting to write about. The setting is very much pre-modern in terms of medicine.
I want to give a character of mine a wound infection on his leg. Something severe enough to raise the stakes, but not lethal. Something that would be interesting to write about. The setting is very much pre-modern in terms of medicine.
Oof, as generally right as you are, you really don’t want to pick at your skin, sometimes there actually are reasons…
Back when I was 15 and my pubic hairs were more or less fully growing in, I ended up with a couple of ingrown hairs right under the base of my family staff male member. Yeah, ouch!
After about 2 weeks, I realized those bumps weren’t gonna heal up on their own, so I nerved up and started picking with a needle. After a bit, I caught what I thought was one ingrown hair, and managed to pull it out, though it was way tougher than I expected.
What came out looked like one really thick tightly coiled hair, but after I rinsed it off then rolled it in my fingers, it split apart to reveal it was actually 5 hairs all coiled together! Just on the opposite side was another similar bump that had 2 ingrown hairs coiled together the same way.
After removing those, within like 3 days everything was almost completely healed! Yeah, the absolute last place you’d want to have to pick at your skin, but I knew I had to do something…
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.