Bonus: Nine More Totally Gross Stories

Holy Moly, by Maxine
When I was 15, I decided I hated the big brown mole on my left breast. Hated it so much, in fact, that it had to be removed no matter what obstacles came up. Because in was on my breast, and I was still a teenager and obviously incapable of asking my mother if I could have it professionally removed, I decided there was only one thing to do: remove it myself. After all, I can’t talk my breasts with my mom! Armed with pliers and a pair of (semi-rusty, come to think of) scissors, I faced the mole. Clearly hygiene wasn’t of any importance either since I neither washed (before or afterwards) any of the tools I used. I locked myself into the bathroom and started the mini operation. First I cut off the top of the mole. This entailed snipping away for quite some time considering the size of that thing! It also required some building up of confidence to actually start slicing the skin. When the top was off, I decided the pain was moderate but worth it if it meant having moleless boobs. I thought the second part would be as “painless,” but little did I know. Apparently at some point I decided scissors just wouldn’t cut it (no pun intended) and took to the pliers. One flab of mole at a time I ripped. Ten rips or so and most of the brown colored parts of the mole had been removed. By this time my boob was gushing blood and I had to take off my bra, which I for some reason had kept on until this point. I was also getting frustrated: though the brown parts were off there was still a distinct “lump”, so to speak. I grabbed the scissors and literally sawed off the rest of the mole. This whole time wincing, grimacing, and wincing some more in pain. When my operation was over, I realized I couldn’t put on a shirt without looking like I’d been shot in the chest. So I put on a band-aid and hoped for the best. Cleaning up the bits of mole strewn across the bathroom was another story altogether. I’m pretty sure I flushed them down the toilet, but one landed on my toothbrush and I only found it the next morning right before sticking the toothbrush in my mouth. Two months later the mole had grown back. Bigger. Browner. But never to be removed without anesthesia again!

Pus-Filled Puss, by Samantha
One morning, after a particularly intense sexual encounter that unfortunately lacked the appropriate lubrication, I woke up with painful white spots on my labia. Fearing herpes, I rushed to the doctor to see what could be done. While I peed in a test cup, I noticed the spots had gotten larger, hardened and turned into little balls, one as wide around as a dime. I pinched it to see if it had the all-telling herpes ulcer top and out popped hard white pus, all over my fingers and into the once clean urine specimen. Thoroughly washing my hands, I explained what happened to the doctor, put on a lovely paper cover-up and laid back in the stirrups while she painfully popped a total of six large pus-filled balls. Returning home with an ointment and surgical needle, I spent the next week draining pus out of my puss. Next time, I’m definitely using lube.

Puke, Puker, Pukest, by Denise
When I was 16, I had jaw surgery to correct a problem I call “Freddie Mercury Mouth”. Essentially, a surgeon broke my jaw, re-set it in its new position and wired my jaw shut for two months. It is important to note that for the three years leading up to the surgery my orthodontist moved my teeth around so they fit together perfectly once the surgery was performed.

So imagine me waking up from this first operation, cheeks swollen; fresh, raw stitches in my gums; and the horrifying realization that I was allergic to anesthesia.

The first thing I remember was seeing my best friend and her mom standing at one side of the bed, my mom on the other.

The second thing I remember is the familiar panic of the need to vomit. Yes, vomit. Vomit into my mouth with the perfectly aligned teeth.

My only option was to swallow it. No way to swish, and no way to spit out any of it. With tears streaming down my cheeks I was able to make out my friend and her mom slowly backing out of the room.

Oh, but it gets worse.

I puked again. The same puke, back into my mouth.

All in all, I threw up the same vomit THREE TIMES, and had to swallow it ALL THREE TIMES.

I Was A Halloween Fountain Centerpiece, by Belinda
When I was 14 years old I developed a really disgusting medical condition called ‘ulcerative colitis’, which is as nasty as it sounds: essentially my immune system decided one day to eat away at my intestines, and many painful putrid ulcers sprouted up on my gut. It’s incurable, and flares up on occasion, but no flare up was as vile and horror-movie-like as my first one. After feeling very unwell for a few weeks (the doctor said it was quite common for 14 year old girls to lie about pooping blood out their ass), my family was treated to a most wonderful sight at about midnight one August evening: me standing up and leaning over the sink in the bathroom, coughing and retching violently, in a dainty wee white nightgown, with what seemed like gallons of blood pumping out of (nearly) every orifice of my body. I was like a Halloween fountain centerpiece. Standing in a puddle of my own gore, I remember raising my head and staring balefully at my mother with blood all over my face (even better, I’m pale with black hair so think Ellie from Let the Right One In).

It gets better. Once you have a certified ‘butt disease’ as I jovially call it, you undergo all sorts of truly foul medical examinations. I had a colonoscopy, which is where a cable as long as 3 tennis courts is fed up your arse, and you get pumped full of awesome sedatives. The cable has a little camera and claw on the end, and the doctors set it up in such a way that you can watch the internal examination of your intestine on television. Two horrific details for you: they had to take a biopsy, so I remember watching as this claw tugged and pulled a chunk of my flesh off from inside. It felt like an alien was inside me and trying to scratch its way out of my stomach. The second detail: I remember being shocked by how diseased looking my gut was. Healthy guts are supposed to be pink…I shit you not (heh)…mine was green. I remember seeing these painful yellow ulcers, and what appeared to be a green and red frothy river of blood and extreme infection. It was like I had the fucking River Styx inside me.

One final macabre tale. Due to my gut being inflamed, blocked, and generally not working, on a few occasions I actually vomited up shit. Which is something I’m strangely proud of.

Vag Steak, by dearwalnutgrove
I went on the a regular monthly pill as a teenager, but when Seasonale came out with a generic and tons of ads my freshman year of college, I was like, That is such a good idea. I went to my doctor and got a script.

For the first month things were fine, no side-effects at all except for some minor acne. Then about 5 weeks into the pill pack I was driving down main street to get a Slurpee at 7-11, when I felt something soft and warm just kind of plop into my drawers. I thought I had just given birth to a peep or something. I waddled into the 7-11 bathroom, and there in the crotch of my panties was a mucousy-bloody-ball that looked like a wet craft pom-pom, you know the really big ones. I figured I was having some weird breakthrough bleeding so I stuck a tampon in and discarded my delicates.

Later that day I started having cramps. Like can’t breathe, can’t see straight cramps. They came and went over the next few hours. So now it gets too gross. I went to take my tampon out. I expected normal blood, or just light blood since it was only “breakthrough.” Instead, what I found were solid strips of beige and purpley tissue stuck to my tampon. It looked like medium rare flank steak. So I switched to pads. This was a bad idea because now I could kind of feel them slivering out sometimes. This continued on and off with some normal clots and blood for A WEEK. So much for 4 periods a year right? Eventually the steak stopped, and it was mostly clots. Then for some reason, the clots started getting bigger. First they were soggy raisins, then jelly blobs, then bloody caterpillars, then bigger than my big toe. I know this because I measured them once. At this point it had been two weeks of bloody swamp monster discharge and I was beyond weirded out. I mean, how could my uterus even hold that much tissue to begin with? I began to fear that the whole organ had disintegrated and was eking out my vaginal canal, that the pom pom had been my ovary and the strips of steak had been my fallopian tubes. So I quit taking Seasonale. And guess what? It went away. I’ve never taken normal period blood for granted since.

That’s Not Kosher, by Amy
When I was around 7 I went to the bathroom and shitted out a piece of ham. It was white ham, but my cousins came in and we all verified it was ham.

The Motherlode, by Roberto
This didn’t happen to me but I was a party to the grossness you are about to read. I’m a nurse, and at the time I worked in an urgent care office. One day I came home from work, and my mother (who lives with me) says to me “Sweetheart, can you take a look at this thing on my back?” and I said “Sure, what’s going on?” She says “I just feel a big lump on my shoulder/neck/upper back area and it’s making my neck so stiff that I can’t turn my head. I asked (my 8 year old son) to tell me what he saw and he made a face and said ‘Eww Nana, that stinks'”. So I pull down the back of her shirt to see, and there was a lump under her skin about the size of a lime. It wasn’t red. It was the same color as the rest of her skin, and there was a tiny hole in the middle that was weeping clear fluid. And my kid was right, it DID stink. I said “Ma, I think you have a cyst”. I told her that if she went to the doctor they’d lance it and start a series of antibiotics and she freaked out. Terrified of letting a doctor do it, she asked me. I’d assisted in them many times and it’s not much more different than popping a big zit, only I was home and didn’t have the right instruments. I was forced to improvise. I got a whole role of paper towels, cleaned her up with alcohol, sterilized a giant embroidery needle on the stove, and poked it in the hole. “Do you feel that?” going deeper and deeper “No”. “How about that?” going deeper and deeper, “Nope. Doesn’t hurt at all”. I had the needle all the way in, about 3 1/2 inches into the lump. I begin to withdraw it and yellow pus soon follows. I began to squeeze and squeeze but the amount of pus that came out was really small in contrast to the size of the mass. So I go in again with the needle, this time moving it in circles to widen the hole so that its contents had a larger opening in which to evacuate. This seemed to work because I squeezed it really hard right after and then we heard and audible pop sound. Like “THWAP!” and a huge splat of green, yellow, white cheesy pus ribboned with blood, spattered against the wall, window and ceiling. YES. Ceiling. The smell was indescribably wretched. I would say it’s the most foul thing I’ve ever smelled but in my line of work, it’s not always accurate or easy to discern one disgusting odor from another. Basically it was the smell of rotting human flesh, garbage, and stale vomit. I immediately did what I call the “cootie dance of terror”, frantically patting myself all over, trying to wipe off any pus that might have landed on me in the explosion, meanwhile my mother let out a huge sigh of relief as one might do when they finally find a bathroom after a long car ride. Nasty.

The Thing That Ate My Leg, by Kate
About 18 moths ago, I awoke on a Thursday morning with a series of bites (I guess?) on both legs. The area around the bites were inflamed, and though it wasn’t too painful the skin on my leg felt tight and hot. Four days later, there was no improvement. It was Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, and my friend Kevin and I had spent the day drinking and eating lobster. Every couple hours he would ask to look at my leg and screech, “You’re gonna lose it!” So off we went to the ER.

The nice nurses in triage freaked out a little when they saw the leg, and asked me more than once, “Did anybody hurt you?” After we sorted that part out, one nurse said, “I hope you don’t have to stay here overnight.” Me neither, lady.

The exhausted, harried resident stuck working the holiday weekend told me that I probably had bedbugs. But considering that the bites were a one-time event, I disagreed with him, and suggested they were some sort of spider bites. “Spiders don’t bite,” he informed me. Doctors know everything!

We agreed to disagree on whatever the cause of my freaky looking legs. He prescribed a heavy dose of an antibiotic I later found out was used to treat MRSA. I had to take these pills three times a day for 10 days, and my guts were NOT pleased about that situation. But it did clear up the leg. Now there’s only little discolorations where you can see shadows of the bites. I guess it doesn’t sound all that bad, but the pictures are terrifying.

That’s all for today!
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[Puke image via Stocksock/Shutterstock.]