Confessions of a Popaholic
I have never shared this with anyone. You folks are the first to know this about me.
It started innocently enough with a cyst un-affectionately nicknamed George. Ten minutes and more to squeeze the contents of this massive cyst out of someone’s back. I remember that it was nauseating to me then. Now I can watch this kind of thing without flinching. I know the difference between a sub-cutaneous suture and a surface one. I know the difference between an epidermoid cyst and a pilar cyst and have developed a certain obsession with steatacystomas. Blackheads, dilated pores of Winer, whiteheads. Sebaceous plugs.
It’s not just me. Back in the day there weren’t very many cyst extractions on YouTube but today it took half an hour of scrolling and finally using an outside search engine to find George again. Not long after I started looking for cyst videos, Dr. Sandra Lee came on the scene and changed the game. Reasonable video quality, good lighting, extreme close ups and proper medical equipment, and sanitary conditions, I took to Dr. Lee’s YouTube channel like a duck to water. I think for the past three years I’ve watched every single video she has put out. So much better than the shaky hand-held camera work of someone removing a pore strip from their nose. Now videos of pimple popping get the porn treatment of great lighting and extreme close ups of the action.
There’s a lot more than pimple popping out there that seems to fill the same niche. I’ve spent hours watching Dr. Micha remove mango worm maggots from dogs in the Gambia. It started with a video of a puppy that was part duck, part dog. It seems in that part of the world, a species of fly leaves its eggs in sandy soils and when dogs sleep in it, they pick up parasites that burrow into their skin and grow over the space of about three weeks into substantial maggots that can be removed from the skin by squeezing the lumps. Mango worms can kill the dogs. I was devastated in 2018 when Dr. Micha decided he had had enough and packed it in and moved his family back to Germany. My heard bled for every dog he profiled. There have been very few new videos now that he has left the Gambia.
In another series, you can follow the work of an organization treating people in Africa for jiggers. I don’t know much about these critters, just that removing them looks only marginally less painful than having them. One can go pretty far down a rabbit-hole on YouTube. For the truly weird, I recommend Dandruff Art, which is exactly what it sounds like. It is still incredibly weird and often really, really funny. If you enjoy watching bits of someone’s scalp being carefully removed, that is.
Why are these videos so fascinating? Why do hours go by when I suddenly realize it’s well past bed time and I’m still watching? I find myself reacting with a level of anxiety for each lump squeezed followed by a release when whatever it is comes out of the skin. There’s such a relief at seeing a person whose face is clearer, or the dogs whose energy has picked up as they recover from their infestations. This story is taking longer to write because I keep getting sucked back into the videos as I search for them to include links. So hard to look away in the same way that it’s hard to not look when you pass an accident on the highway.
So there it is. I’m clearly a popaholic. And clearly, by the explosion of videos to watch over the past few years, I’m not alone.
