So many abscesses in this era of MRSA are wholly unsatisfying to drain.  I’ll cut into a large firm area of tender red skin looking for pus but finding instead this stringy straggly dried-out gunk.  MRSA isn’t just immune to certain antibiotics, it’s meaner and more aggressive too.  Anecdotally, the rise of MRSA has made draining boils a lot less fun.

One good way to give yourself a boil is by shooting up, pushing a heroin/bacteria cocktail underneath the skin.  The lady I saw let this fester under her arm for about a week before finally coming in.  Her boil was old school though, a soft squishy skin-colored mass the size of a scoop of lunch lady mashed potatoes.

I poked through the skin with an 11 blade and watched contentedly as greenish-brown pus erupted and oozed out like the fake lava from my middle school science day project.  Now this, I thought, is the way it’s supposed to be.  I miss parachute pants, the icky shuffle, and old school boils.  Well, maybe not parachute pants.