Pardon me for lapsing into the Daily Mail’s selective-capitalizing headline-writing convention, but I think this instance demanded it.
Are you horny yet? Our pop of the week is.
Patient: Lisa, 42, Litchfield, NH
Condition: A horn. That’s not a euphemism or figurative. It’s a horn. A hundred percent a horn. Nothing else to call it but what it is: a horn.
“It’s a horn. It’s basically…you’d see a rhinoceros. It’s a hard horn,” said Lisa, leaving no doubt at all that there was absolutely a horn growing off the back of her head.
Lest you still think I’m just playing fast and loose with lingo, the medical name for Lisa’s condition is a cutaneous horn. See that? Medicine agrees: She had a horn.
I mean, Dr. Pimple Popper banged it against a hard surface after removing it and it made the same blunt clacking sound that my seventh grade teacher’s giant onyx ring would when he’d bang it against his desk to get our attention.
This horn was concerning for a few reasons: It meant Lisa always had to keep her hair up.
It hurt when bumped, and also she worried that it could be cancerous as several of her family members died of cancer.
How stomach-turning was the treatment?: You know, as this show goes, what was more unnerving was the existence of what needed to be treated rather than the treatment. Dr. Lee was able to just…pull the horn off? It was less dramatic than I expected but still disturbing in its ease. It was just, like, perched there?
Of course, there was the ring around the horn to deal with as well as the pilar cyst detritus to pull out of the literal hole in Lisa’s head that the horn left. You know, the usual.
The results: No more horn! And what really concerned Lisa, the possible cancer that the horn portended, turned out not to exist. So not only was she horn free, she was cancer free. A total triumph.
I can barely believe that every week of this show marks new innovations in comparing pus to food, but it almost always does and so this week we got a slew of brand new analogies to turn our stomachs. A puddle of pus was described as the “devil’s creamsicle.” The words of Forrest Gump were invoked when the uncertain consistency of pre-surgery lipomas was compared to “a box of chocolates.” The mother of a teenage patient said she would make her son’s removed lipoma gristle into chicken nuggets. And, in possibly my favorite entry in Dr. PP’s rapidly filling dictionary of such food analogies, she compared pus to “the grey stuff” immortalized in Beauty and the Beast’s “Be Our Guest.”
How does she do it? How do any of us?