Last Friday, I went to see my local GP about a rather annoying sebaceous cyst in my right shoulder. It was inflamed and sore, and had already been there for a week, so he put me on flucloxacillin, 2g per day. Jump to Wednesday morning, nothing much has happened, though the rate of growth has slowed – I see a different doctor at the practice in the morning just have it checked, and she says to continue the antibiotics until Friday anyway, at which point she’ll book a surgeon to lance it if it hasn’t change.

Wednesday night, it was a good bit larger than Wednesday morning, and I had hell getting to sleep. Rang the practice at 8:00 AM, got an appointment with the first doctor I saw at 8:40 AM. At 8:50 he asks me what I had planned for the rest of the day – ‘Surgery?’. By 8:55 AM he was on the phone to the on-call surgeon at A&E, and then the bed manager. By 9:05 I’m out the door of the practice with a letter in my hand, and by 9:20 I’m seeing the triage nurse for admission to A&E.

Somewhere around 10:00 I’m talking to a cute junior doctor about why I’m there, case history with respect anesthetic, drug allergies etc. Somewhere around 10:30, as she’s drawing blood, I mention to her ‘I’m going in to shock’… then I woke up to a rebooting brain (and a rebooting brain is really, really interesting to me – totally incoherent, no vision, basic audio, but no recognition of speech, random imagery from childhood), and my breakfast all over my shirt and trousers. They helped me onto a trolley to recover while cleaning up the floor; I missed the doctor at least.

The registrar shows up a bit later (I’ve lost track of time now, my phone is off and a mental reboot screws with my time sense), looks at the lump and says they can’t cut the cyst out, but they can lance it. I agree to this. He comes back with the scalpel and other tools, and says ‘Sorry, we can’t give you any local anesthetic, it won’t work.’ I pretty much shrug and say go for it. ‘This is going to hurt.’ You know, he wasn’t kidding when he said that – a scalpel may be sharp, but it hurts like a bear when slicing into inflamed tissue that has no anesthetic. Turns out he thought the pus was all the way up to the surface, but it was just bad blood (blood isn’t meant to be that colour unless you’re an alien).

Consultant shows up somewhere in the middle of the registrar cutting and flushing the blood out and the first thing he asks for is some local anesthetic. Gave the registrar and junior doctor advice on how to always use local, even if they don’t think it’ll help much, because you never know. Two jabs and a sharp sting later, and I don’t even feel the slice when he lances the cyst. I hear it though, it goes *splutch* and some of the contents end up about 6 inches away on my arm. A bit of pressure and pain as he cleans it out, and then packs it full of ’seaweed’. By 12:15 I’m out the door, getting meds (£13.70 total) and going home.

I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask for a photo post surgery, but I’ll see if the district nurse will get one for me on Sunday, just to satisfy my knowledge (and satisfy a condition of posting on Ars Technica :). I have a hole about 1.5 cm long and 1 cm deep in my shoulder. No idea how wide though.