Relative Something

Have you ever heard of a granuloma?

gran•u•lo•ma | granyə’lōmə |

a mass of granulation tissue, typically produced in response to infection, inflammation, or the presence of a foreign substance.

Twelve years ago, this happened to me:

“…I started to get careless and impatient. I stepped right into the needle-sharp point of a wood thorn on one tree branch. It punctured the side of my knee and left me in a lot of pain. I checked more than once to make sure the tip hadn’t broken off in there. It didn’t look like it, but it sure hurt like something was still in there.” – Relative Something: Day Off, July 23, 2013

The site of the puncture became reddened and eventually purple. On occasion, I was able to drain some pus or clear fluid. My doctor looked at it once and decided it didn’t look concerning. After a while, it calmed down and just remained a purple dot on the side of my knee that I lived with, unconcerned. I would have guessed maybe five years had passed. Possibly seven.

A couple of weeks ago, the site began to swell up anew. It became hard to ignore, and I picked at it a bit. The top dead layer of skin over the site would flake off. When I picked at the skin recently, it opened up and released clear fluid again. I told myself I would give it closer attention when I next had an opportunity.

That opportunity was Sunday evening. After I’d done some squeezing around the area, I noticed a dark spot. I grabbed a pair of tweezers and prepared to see what I could accomplish.

This was the result:

For twelve years, that thorn was poked straight into the side of my knee so deep it was not visible. Apparently, my cells had walled it off to isolate it, and the situation became a standoff. I am lucky that it didn’t interfere with the knee joint and became easy to ignore. The only reason I figured out it had been in there for twelve years was because I knew I had written about it in this blog when it happened, and found the post by searching for the words “thorn” and “puncture.”

As I attempted to grip it with the tweezers, I worried it would be mushy and break apart, but it was completely solid and hard enough to be easily grasped.

At almost 2 cm long, I could barely believe my eyes as it exited my knee in one long, smooth pull. I’ve been feeling giddy over having it out ever since. It’s kind of funny to me that I had grown indifferent to the purple spot for more than a decade, but now feel so overjoyed to have the cause of that dot extracted. I’m curious as to why my body decided it was finally time to push it to the surface. Maybe it was just so deep it took this long to do.

None of that matters now. It’s out! And I am incredibly happy that it is.

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