Home Remedy

 This is an excerpt from the book “I Have No Business Being Here” - available now. Read the whole collection here.

I've had a lump behind my right ear for as long as I can remember. Maybe it has been a year, maybe 5 years. But right at the base of my ear where my lobe dangles near my neck, there lives a small lump. It was nothing to worry about at first - no bigger than a pimple, but over the years it has grown larger until last Sunday, I reached back absentmindedly and felt it as I was having lunch with my friend, LeeAnn. She and I have been friends since middle school, and she has seen my emotions run the gamut from slight upset to full on tantrum.

Maybe I was more likely to consider my lump that day because of how I have been spending my time recently. In the last few weeks, I have been absolutely addicted to the TLC reality show, Dr. Pimple Popper. It is an hour-long television show that features three to five cases of folks at their wits end, suffering under the weight of unsightly growths with nowhere to turn. Except with this show, they do have somewhere to turn – dermatologist Dr. Sandra Lee, also known as Dr. Pimple Popper.

One middle aged flight attendant with a thick New York accent declared that no doctor he had seen in 12 years was able to cure him of the unsightly purple grapefruit that had taken residence above his right knee. It wobbled when he walked and banged the armrests of seats as he walked the plane during beverage service. The B-roll footage showed him shimmying into jeans, wincing as the softball on his leg pressed tight against the fabric, not unlike the way I cram myself into my skin tight Spanx jeans (Yes, Spanx makes jeans, and they're FABULOUS!)

Another patient, a handsome, blue-eyed personal trainer with a rock-solid body felt self-conscious and was even dumped by a prior girlfriend due to the grape-size red protrusion growing just at the top of his nose. It had finally begun to jut into his eye socket, and I imagine made left turns tricky.

In both cases, Dr. Lee greeted the men like she does all her patients, chipper and warmhearted, with a dazzling smile and a friendly pat on the shoulder. "I think we can take care of this," she tells seemingly everybody, putting to ease these lump-covered dejected souls who had so far encountered nothing but rejection. This beautiful doctor would make them beautiful, too. And the results speak for themselves. Dr. Lee suits up, grabs her trusty Sharpie, and gets to marking guides for herself where she'll eventually insert her scalpel.

"We've got to make sure to get the whole thing," she tells them. Cysts, internal sacs full of discarded skin cells, grow and stretch the skin, creating these lumps. If you leave the sac behind, it can re-fill. With both the personal trainer and the flight attendant, she sliced ever so carefully on her pre-drawn Sharpie line, squishing and poking and draining until the lumpy beige liquid dribbled into a waiting bed pan.

"Looks like oatmeal," she tells the flight attendant, who then declares he probably won't be eating any more oatmeal any time soon.

The hottie with the grape smashing his eye was a slightly tougher case. The grape was located in what Dr. Lee called "the triangle of death," an area on the face home to many blood vessels with direct routes to the brain. An infection in this area can head straight for the brain, leading to paralysis or even death. Luckily, she mashed on the little red lump long enough to get all the chunks out, using tweezers to pull the sac alongside it, and sewed him back up with no signs of issues.

"We don't want our friend coming back," she said, dangling the empty translucent sac from the end of her tweezers.

I've had my lump for so long I actually tend to forget that it is there. Sometimes when I put in an earring, I'll graze it. It never hurts but has just grown bigger and bigger without my noticing. Now, a season deep into Dr. Pimple Popper, I have begun to worry.

Sitting with LeeAnn, our empty plates of chicken shwarma before us, our conversation lulled from upcoming travel plans, so I took my chance and came out with it. "I've got a lump behind my ear," I told her. I hadn't told anyone yet, having succumbed to the irrational theory of "If I don't acknowledge it, it is not there."

"What kind of lump?" she asked.

"I don't know. Probably cancer. Or a cyst. A lipoma," I said. She scrunched up her face and shook her head.

"Let me look at it," she said. I leaned forward and folded my ear down, pulling back my hair so she could see. I imagined it was a round little pink thing, like a baby's finger pressing through from the other side of my skin.

"It's black," she said. Then she stifled a laugh, and I saw her eyes move as she looked over my shoulder. We were sitting in a new Mediterranean restaurant near my house with clean lines and white tables. At the table behind us, two women were holding hands, their heads down and eyes closed, mumbling prayers. LeeAnn got tickled. "They're praying and I'm here checking out your lump."

I'm not sure what they were praying about, but it should have been me. I'm no biblical expert, but I think lepers were on the list of unfortunates that deserved prayers.

"What does it look like again?" I asked.

"It's black," she said. "I mean the tip is black."

My stomach turned — black on the top. A sure sign of a tumor, definitely a malignant one, and so near the base of my skull and my brain. All the good things I had planned for the next few months - trips, concerts, seeing my nieces grow up, watching another live action remake of a Disney cartoon - all disappeared in a blink. I frowned.

"You should try to pop it yourself," she said. I thought for a minute about asking her to do it, testing the bounds and limits of our friendship. Do you love me enough to press on my skin until goo oozes out?

"Maybe I'll just go to a doctor," I said, so flippantly it sounded even more pretentious than I actually am. Sure, I'll just cruise right into a doctor's office! It's easy! I'll go right after my champagne bath!

For me, it is easy. Not the champagne bath but going to the doctor. I'm lucky that my job has good health benefits and pays me a livable wage to afford them. Not so for LeeAnn and dozens of other friends I know who pay hundreds of dollars a month in premiums only to be told certain procedures or medicines won't be covered.

This going-to-the-doctor business is actually a new deal for me. I grew up with no health insurance. My dad was an independent contractor for the Dallas Morning News, delivering newspapers from their production plant around Garland, a slummy suburb north east of Dallas.

When we got sick as kids, we were told to "suck it up" or "get over it." Not so much in an effort to make us tough - if that were the goal then my parents failed miserably. I yelp and wail at the slightest bit of pain, and if I am ever lucky enough to get sick, I drag it out for days or weeks, milking every sympathetic hug, back rub, or ice cream pint I can for as long as possible.

The "suck it up" family motto, borne of necessity and a lack of health insurance, worked fine for bumps and scrapes. We guzzled Triaminic, and ace-bandaged and gauze-wrapped our way back to health dozens of times. But when something more serious happened, that's when it was time to hit the ER.

One of these "more serious" incidents happened on a summer day when I was nine. My dad worked nights, so he stayed home with my older sister, Shannon, and me while my mom visited her mother, our Mam-Maw, in the hospital with a broken neck.

It sounds worse when you say it like that, but Mam-maw had osteoporosis, which meant any small bump or fall could break a bone. This time she cracked a few upper vertebrae which the doctors corrected by drilling four industrial screws into my grandmother's skull. These screws held in place a metal halo, which then attached to her shoulders via a plastic vest resembling medieval chest armor. It was, in medical terms, a whole ordeal. My grandmother took it like a champ and even let us decorate her new metal exoskeleton with glittery butterfly stickers.

While mom was away, Shannon, Dad and I spent the day like any normal summer day. That morning, I watched the movie musical Grease, unsupervised for the twenty-third day in a row. I'm not sure if I was just feeling extra helpful or if it was the way John Travolta and Jeff Conaway shined their "pussy wagon" Greased Lightning, but I decided to wash the car.

At that time, my parents had two cars — one was a white 1992 Dodge Caravan. We used this for road trips, general getting around, and in the mornings, when my mom would rush me off to school still in my pajamas, I used it as a dressing room. (I like to sleep late and she, as she put it, "had no interest in a truant child.")

My dad drove the other, a 1986 Jeep Cherokee, which, at ten years old, still maintained its shine. It was a gorgeous cherry red with a sleek looking chrome bumper and matching hub caps. I knew it was chrome because Daddy told me. And not just me, he told anyone who would ask, and lot of people who didn't ask. He probably also mumbled it in his sleep.

Snore

Exhale

It's all chroooomeeee.

My dad was not a prideful man with the exception of three areas - his children, his car, and his beard. Of these, he was unabashedly proud, boastful almost. Growing up in Detroit in the early 1950s and 60s, his father worked at the Ford plant before the family moved to East Tennessee in 1967. The family never had much money. My grandfather spilt his paycheck between supporting his five children and his tab at the local bar.

Grandpa would drink most of his paycheck away and come home in the dark, looking for a fight. Finding my granny and the kids asleep, he would bang around, hollering. If my dad heard the bedroom door beside his opening, where his four little sisters slept inside, he would get up, head to the hallway and knock something over. This would set Grandpa off but also redirected his rage away from the sleeping girls and right to my father. And when Grandpa slipped out and abandoned the family before my dad's sophomore year of high school, leaving my grandmother alone with a teenage son and four little girls to feed, my dad headed to Texas to work with his uncle and send money back home to Knoxville.

So it's no wonder that, when he had the opportunity to raise kids of his own, my dad spoiled us. Whenever I was struck with a cold as a child and needed to take cough medicine, my mother would try to come at me with a big silver tablespoon of sour liquid once or twice. When I refused, she'd shrug and tell me, "Well I guess your throat doesn't hurt that bad."

My dad would then sit me up on the counter and ask me to take the medicine. When I refused, he would first beg, then bargain.

"If I juggle these oranges for 30 seconds, will you take your medicine?" he would ask.

"Yes," I would lie. After the stage show, I would get a look on my face, a protruding lip, welled up eyes, and he couldn't bring himself to force me to take the medicine. He would put his hands on his hips, standing exasperated on the yellow linoleum and regroup like a jester standing before a petty toddler queen.

Eventually, I would take the medicine, but mostly after being promised a treat as a reward, usually cookie or, my favorite, a Mrs. Baird's fried pie.

Daddy loved us kids, and he also loved his beard. When we were grown ups, he would look on the beard with reverence in photos, even years after he'd shaved it off: "Look at it. Full coverage. No patches. That deep chestnut color. Gorgeous."

"Dad, we're in those photos, too," we would remind him.

"Yes, yes," he would say. "Fun trip, excellent." But the line of his eyes was trained on his beard.

And, finally, he loved his cars. The one line he drew in his spoiling of us was drawn at the cars. We were never ever allowed to touch the cars. Initially, I took to this rule with jealousy and a little annoyance. Did he love the cars more than me? Of course not; I know that now. But at the time, I felt a little hurt.

I later learned a family down the street had two of their children hospitalized after a parked car accident. The kids, who weren't much older than me, had climbed into the family's station wagon, parked on their steep driveway. Somehow in their roughhousing, the kids kicked the car into neutral and rolled backward into our busy street. An oncoming car t-boned them.

When I heard that, I learned my dad's strict car rules were born, not out of some favor he had of the cars over us, but out of abject terror that something bad may happen to us. It's what really drives all parental decisions, I think (which, as an unmarried, childless woman in my thirties, I am obviously fully qualified to comment on.)

So that summer day when I was 10, considering this rule, I decided not to tell him that I would be washing his car. I found myself excited at the prospect of a pleased father, that chrome bumper he so fawned over, shiny enough for him to look into and admire his own beard.

The first major obstacle was the Jeep's location – it was parked inside our garage, a solid 50 feet from the nearest water spout. I could have tried to use the kitchen sink, but there were two problems with that plan: first, it would have drawn too much attention to me, and even worse, I would have committed another cardinal McKinney Family Sin: "Do not leave the door open in the summer: we are not trying to air condition the whole neighborhood."

Instead, I rifled around beneath the kitchen sink where Mom kept her cleaning supplies and took out a bottle full of store-brand blue window cleaner. I snuck the paper towels off the mounted rack beside the stove and headed outside. To wash a whole Jeep. Using off-brand Windex and paper towels.

I got to work. I started with the bumper, the most precious part, spraying the chrome, careful to avoid the front-mounted license plate. It jutted out, ugly and out of place, its sharp edges, rounded off but not covered by any sort of plastic bumper.

Next I washed the grill, pleased how easily the crusted bugs went limp under the onslaught of the window spray and crumpled into the paper towel. After the headlights were nice and shiny, I moved on to the hood.

That was a more of a challenge, considering my height at age 10. I wasn't the small fry in class, but also not quite tall enough to reach to the upper edge of the Jeep's hood. I sprayed a nice coat on the bottom half of the hood that I could reach. Then in an effort to reach the top of the hood and adjacent windshield, I put my little bare foot, blackened by garage floor, onto the glinting chrome bumper.

I made it. Balanced on my knees on the hood, I began spraying the windshield. But each time I reached forward to wipe, I would find my hand just far enough away to reach the glass. I tried to shimmy but still, by the time I had sprayed and tried again to wipe the glass, I found myself slipping down, down until I found myself sprawled on the concrete floor with a grunt.

I looked down to grab my spray bottle and saw it lying on its side just beyond the small but growing pool of blood.

That's when I looked down at my right leg. Just south of my kneecap, on the outside of my leg, there was an open wound. Inside I saw a substance that resembled pimento cheese, although slightly less orange. There was also something red oozing out. But the catch was, nothing really hurt. I just couldn't figure out what I was seeing. I screamed, "DADDY!"

And I kept screaming it, over and over, a helpless little siren in a heap on the hot garage floor.

He cracked the garage door from inside the house, ever cognizant of the self-imposed A/C rule and asked what was wrong. When he got a glimpse of his pathetic youngest child lying, leg outstretched and bloody, surrounded by a mountain of paper towels, he threw open the door without hesitation.

"What happened?" he asked, although a quick look around told the story. A child. A damp car. A license plate, jutting out dripping with blood.

The shock had worn off, and by this time, I was weeping. The bleeding had picked up even with both of us pressing on my skin. The wound still sat open like a pair of hands cupping red water under a faucet. He began hollering for my sister.

She emerged from the door, at first flippant, which then turned horrified at the crime scene she saw in front of the Jeep.

"Get a cup towel!" Daddy commanded. Shannon came back with a ragged terry cloth hand towel, yanked from the handle on the front of our old yellow stove. He wrapped up my leg and applied pressure while Shannon called 911.

"My...uh... my sister is bleeding and my dad, he...uh... he's trying to...." she tried describing the scene to the 911 operator. The real story, "My sister fell off of a slippery Jeep that she herself had covered in a thin layer of Windex only moments before" sounded too stupid. Shannon stuck to the facts - Kid bleed. Dad try to stop bleed. Send ambulance.

In quick succession, an ambulance of EMTs came and, after wrapping my leg in gauze, left almost immediately. Later, I would hear my parents discuss the decision for Daddy to drive me to the hospital in the very Jeep that had caused my injuries, my blood still drying on the front bumper. "An ambulance ride would have cost THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS" they would say, claiming later that it would have cost "FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS" then a thousand, then a kidney.

We sat in the waiting room while my mom drove from one hospital to another. She sped from downtown Dallas and met us in the dark and crowded hospital lobby, just past the library in downtown Mesquite. The Mesquite Hospital has by now changed hands several times, being bought and sold, improved and run down. But when I was there, it looked like the hospital out of a horror movie. A bloodied teen could run up, yelling, "He's chasing us, he's chasing us!" and the uninterested woman behind the desk, trifold paper hat on her head, squeaking shoes beneath her feet, would say, "Take a number, kid."

That is how I came to sit with my gaping leg wound dripping redness onto the gauze, for twelve hours before a doctor would finally see me.

When they took me back to a large open room, I was told to lie down on a gurney, separated from other moaning wretches by only the thin curtains that hung from shower hooks from the stained tile ceiling. I looked first for Hawkeye then Radar, feeling certain I had been transported to the military hospital from all those episodes of M*A*S*H I had watched with Mam-Maw.

"We've gotta numb it," the doctor announced to no one in particular. My mother stood vigilant at the foot of the bed, wringing her hands and watching for any sign of error from the doctor. Meanwhile, Daddy walked to the head of the bed and put his face close to mine.

"Ok sweetie," he started, searching my crying face with his piercing blue eyes. "They're going to poke you and it may hurt for a minute, but only for a minute," he lied.

I nodded and felt better, at least for having him there. The doctor then began to work. It started with what felt like dragging the sharp end of a needle up and down my leg bone and ended an eternity later, with the doctor making a knot, finishing off a row of about 15 stitches.

"Come back in a month or two and we'll take them out," he said. We later learned from my cousin, a pediatric nurse, that the stitches should have come out much sooner. She actually slid them out of me herself three weeks later, leaving just one behind that had grown in my skin.

I believe if it had been possible, my parents would not have taken me to the hospital that day. An ER visit couldn't have been cheap, and although we weren't living off scraps, money was tight back then. But they did what they had to, insurance or not.

Now I'm grown and I don't have Daddy around to juggle oranges for me or bribe me with fruit pies to take my medicine. I'm 33. I live alone. And now, it is up to me to handle things like a lump.

When I got home from lunch with LeeAnn, I decided to take a look for myself. I stood in my floor length bathroom mirror and folded my ear down, turning my head and straining my eyes so I could see it. She was right. It was a round, white bump, slightly larger than a pea, with a big black dot in the center.

I could hear LeeAnn. Just pop it. Part of me was afraid, scared that it wouldn't pop, that it was in fact a tumor. The other part was hopeful that, much like those poor bastards on Dr. Pimple Popper, I would feel the satisfaction and relief of draining thick white goo out of myself.

I shut my eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed down on it. Jackpot. An off-white custard oozed out and I pressed and pressed until nothing was left. No bump. Just the smooth surface of the back of my ear.

It sounds idiotic, but I sort of miss my bump. Now I put my finger back where it once was and feel nothing but flesh. I had gotten used to it, reaching back when I was nervous or feeling it absentmindedly when working on a project. And now it is gone.

As I stood in the mirror, pinching the bit of goo between my fingers, I felt proud. There I was, standing in my own house, having lanced my own lump (yes, I continue to refer to it as "lump" because substituting the world "pimple" in a sentence like, "I really miss my pimple," makes me sound insane). But I had handled it myself, no one there to force or cajole me. No need for the promise of a fried pie.

I was a little sad, too, much in the way I am sad when I jolt awake from a nightmare at night with no adult to come in and check on me. I put myself back to sleep, having now learned to take care of myself. But ever missing those days when, having fallen in a heap on the garage floor, someone comes running when I call.

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