The human body is remarkable. It generates, regenerates, facilitates decay, and eventually decays. In Buddhism deterioration begins at birth (not much for optimism, but I think several Buddhist tenets are misunderstood, like “life is suffering”; perhaps reflections on this are for a later post). I’m not interested in lamenting on degeneration or on the fact of impermanence, even though these things are true and make for delicious contemplation.
I’m interested in the life and evolution of an infected sebaceous cyst, and its influence. Alternatively called epidermal cysts and keratin cysts, sebaceous cysts, according to Harvard Health Publishing, “are small lumps that arise within the skin on the face, neck, upper back and upper chest. A sebaceous cyst can form when the opening to a sebaceous gland becomes blocked. The oily substance called sebum continues to be produced but cannot escape to the outer skin surface…A cyst is a movable, dome-shaped, smooth-surfaced mass that varies in size from a few millimeters to several centimeters (from less than a quarter of an inch to more than 2 inches). Sebaceous cysts appear primarily on the face, upper back and upper chest.” https://www.health.harvard.edu/a_to_z/sebaceous-cysts-a-to-z
Yes, they do. A sebaceous cyst the size of my two eyes combined promptly appeared on my upper back a few days ago and comfortably grew, made a home, got secure to a point that the nurse inspecting it at KPJ Kajang said, “the lump is almost bigger than your body.” It was a joke. She laughed. I laughed. But it was a good indication of how bold, majestic, maybe even magnanimous my sebaceous cyst was. The one dermatologist and one GP I visited prior to finally succumbing to surrendering the fate of my cyst to a specialist hospital both automatically knew that its fate belonged to the tools of a surgeon.
And so it was.
I placed myself and my cyst in the surprisingly non-clinical room of a surgeon who proceeded to describe the nature, history and life cycle of sebaceous cysts, equipped with gory internet photos of the various moods and moments of the cyst’s journey.
“I was just going to let it pop,” I say in my lay person’s voice, completely content in my ignorance.
I look at my husband’s amused face. The truth is, he was responsible for causing enough alarm in me to cart my cyst to the professional arena. Maybe it’s love, maybe it’s the fact that he’s the son of doctors, but most probably because it’s a combination of those two factors: I listened and at some point after continuously threatening to allow the cyst to evolve and die naturally as all things do, I took my cyst seriously.
The doctor isn’t amused. He isn’t shocked or moved. He’s pure business. He loves talking about cysts. I can see it in his eyes, the glow of insight and knowledge. I love how he loves describing cysts, displaying images of them in their full ugly glory.
Can someone truly be this passionate about a growth filled with a sea of pus, blood, bodily fluids?
Yes, yes, they can. I began to believe in that hospital room. I could take my cyst, and the human body seriously.
In fact, I had to.
“We have to take the cyst to the OT,” the doctor tells me, eyes still glowing. OT, my mind quickly computes, is operating theatre.
For the first time in my life, I’ll be undergoing surgery. Not local anaesthesia, but general, consciousness knocked out—my metaphysical self began its own inquiry into what exactly occurs during the epic anaesthetic sleep; more on that later.
Eight food-deprived hours later, the anaesthetist materialises in a green and white jacket, a tiny black devil, furnished with horns and trident, on his right breast pocket. “I’m here to put you to sleep,” he chuckles. “You’re the devil,” I quip. He nods and laughs some more. Strangely, I feel secure in his care. When the oxygen mask is lowered over my face, he says, “Chill out! It’s just oxygen. The real stuff we’re injecting. In ten seconds you’ll be asleep.”
I don’t believe him. How could anything put me to sleep in 10 seconds? (Okay, I’m just begging to be countered with: a really boring talk/ a really boring face/ a really boring idea and so on and so on). But in that moment, lying on a hospital bed, vulgarly bright fluorescent lights intruding my vision, a squidgy-looking male nurse in lime green scrubs singing Christina Aguilera in perfect pitch, I’m lifetimes away from bored.
When I wake up, my vision is blurred. A couple of nurses are in the distance, their voices like echoes in a dream. Soon, they realise I’m awake. I think I’m about to go for surgery, that the anaesthesia was a lie. They tell me, “Op is over. Time to go back to the room.” The devil’s work was good—excellent, really. Where was I? What happened? These questions were gifts from my cyst.
I’m wheeled back, my stomach churning with phantom vomit. I thought I’d want to eat the universe once I got out of surgery. But this is not the time for food. I hear my husband’s voice, asking about me, and the nurse assuring him, giving instructions. Remnants of the devil’s sleeping potion push me back to sleep. It’s well past midnight. At 5am, the pageantry of nurses performing obligatory checks begins. It will not end until at least 11pm. They have to ensure this body is responding well to the surgery, the medication, that it’s in the process of healing. Each needle prick, each shooting up of painkillers through my poor tiny veins (I discovered I’m one of those with hidden veins that refuse to reveal themselves and give bloody easily), each pulse check is an investigation into the dynamics of this body, and how it will work to heal itself. The human body is remarkable. I’m discovering this not so much because of its capacity to heal, but because of its capacity to tell the truth.
The body keeps the score, says Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. Traumas, suppressed emotions, toxic beliefs, unprocessed hurts: these mark the geology of the body.
When the body says no, says physician and trauma specialist Dr Gabor Maté, disease develops; the body is responding to the complexities of the psychological-emotional network in the psyche. We have mental programmes lodged in our subconscious world, psychologist Bruce Lipton tells us, they run our lives—and our bodies—until they float up to the conscious regions of our minds and are seen for what they are.
In writing sessions I run, I sometimes use an exercise where I ask participants to pick a problematic body part or an illness they’re battling with and write from its point of view. What does that body part want? What is the illness saying? Every single participant, no matter how resistant to the activity, gains answers to their physical struggles. A toothache reveals not only the need to visit the dentist but also the stresses in a significant friendship. A backache announces the need for more forthcoming self-expression. A cyst screams for the need to stop playing old life-draining mental movies—ah yes, as my gorgeously colossal infected sebaceous cyst had to be drained because of the life-draining films I was nursing inside my mental playground, so I’d arrived at a deep point of realisation: my anaesthetic-inspired metaphysical inquiry into consciousness would have to wait. I first had to look in a far more down-to-earth place, of the flesh.
It amazed it.
It amazes me.
I do not for a moment doubt my body’s intelligence, even if it may seem farfetched to think an unhealthy game I’d been playing in my own head that had me swinging on a merry-go-round of stories long over, that no longer or indeed had never served me, that this horror sport of twisting around ancient images that sucked the juice out of joy could produce encounters with a surgeon and the devil disguised as an anesthesiologist (apologies to my sleep doctor for this awfully extended devil metaphor but I’m an opportunist writer and I will take every symbol life throws at me).
The logic to me is clear, from my own experience and from the books I’ve consumed on the body-mind link. I’m now in the land of my cyst—yes, it has been removed by the surgeon’s glinting instruments—but its power is strong, even more so now that we’re in the delicate space of healing. It speaks to me. It reminds me about the possibility of joy, and its importance. It tells me it came from the region of love’s impulse to repair, renew, rejuvenate. And that L.P. Hartley was right to say the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. That’s okay but it’s good to remember that home is here, not there. Thank you to my sleep doctor, to the surgeon who liberated my cyst, to my husband who recognised the vital need of that liberation, and to my cyst. Everything, in the end, has to end. Life is flux. (Turns out it’s a post about impermanence, after all). But, what’s empowering is the ability to put an end to things before they reach a defeatist death that drains the life out of other living things along the way. I’m not saying my internal film fest is over but I can safely say that its scenes are diminishing and being replaced by more attractive ones. The journey continues.
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