I want to give a character of mine a wound infection on his leg. Something severe enough to raise the stakes, but not lethal. Something that would be interesting to write about. The setting is very much pre-modern in terms of medicine.

  • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
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    1 day ago

    I once had something that would erupt in pus whenever I had a small wound anywhere on my body (and delay healing significantly). It was kinda living inside of me, clawing it’s way out.

    • hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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      1 day ago

      Bleh. I once had a huge infected area (don’t ever do skin picking people) on my leg. Definitely sucked, though not something worth writing a chapter or two about.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Oof, as generally right as you are, you really don’t want to pick at your skin, sometimes there actually are reasons…

        Back when I was 15 and my pubic hairs were more or less fully growing in, I ended up with a couple of ingrown hairs right under the base of my family staff male member. Yeah, ouch!

        After about 2 weeks, I realized those bumps weren’t gonna heal up on their own, so I nerved up and started picking with a needle. After a bit, I caught what I thought was one ingrown hair, and managed to pull it out, though it was way tougher than I expected.

        What came out looked like one really thick tightly coiled hair, but after I rinsed it off then rolled it in my fingers, it split apart to reveal it was actually 5 hairs all coiled together! Just on the opposite side was another similar bump that had 2 ingrown hairs coiled together the same way.

        After removing those, within like 3 days everything was almost completely healed! Yeah, the absolute last place you’d want to have to pick at your skin, but I knew I had to do something…

        Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.