Some writers bare their souls in their blog entries.
Today, I bare my buttocks in this blog post.
My left buttock, to be precise.
I'm inspired to write about one of the sexiest parts of my body because I am currently recovering from a minor surgery.
Plus, I'm bored.
And sometimes when I'm bored, I write.
And since my last blog entry was in May 2015, I thought why not make a sensational comeback and write about something close to my, erm, heart?
So.
Nearly 10 years ago, I underwent a rather unusual surgery (read related post here).
It started out as a little red dot: A pimple relatively near my anus.
The year must have been 2006.
Because that was when I started being more serious with triathlon training.
The pimple first developed after a particularly arduous stretch of my bike-riding training sessions in preparation for a triathlon race.
Back then, I thought nothing of the pimple thinking it would go away after a while.
It did - but it came back, bigger and fiercer.
Fast forward to 2011, the recurring pimple took a life form of its own.
The original site of the pimple had grown larger so it stretched from the area near my anus to my butt cheek near my thighs - it looked like a thick slice of dried mango pasted on my butt.
Yet, I chose to live with it because going under the knife would mean that I'd have to stop all triathlon and marathon activities.
On some days, after a 20km run, that region would swell, making it extremely difficult to sit still.
But it came to a point when antibiotics could no longer tame the Backside Beast so I had to operate on it.
In 2011, I did just that.
When I woke up from my surgery, my doctor had very cheerily explained to me what she found.
The original pimple was a cyst, formed because I had been sitting too long on my bike.
And when she cut me open, she found an active abscess - filled with pus and infected flesh.
To eradicate that inflamed region, she would have to - get this - carve out my flesh as if it were a Halloween Pumpkin.
"Then we stuffed gauze into that cavity," I remember the doctor telling me at my bedside.
"So when you get home, just pull out that gauze and soak your buttock in a tub of water with this solution," she said merrily.
I conveyed that message to my younger brother.
"You'll have to help me with the wound dressing," I told him.
He said yes immediately without thinking twice.
When I got home and saw the extent of my surgery, I told my brother that he might faint upon seeing the wound, so I would try to change the dressing myself instead.
He said yes immediately without thinking twice.
Because this is what I told him.
When I got home to pull out the said gauze out of my cavity... the gauze turned out to be at least 1-metre long.
I would never have imagined that I would one day pull something of that magnitude out of my backside.
If I had been in a party, I would be very popular at that point in time.
But I was in my home toilet - which looked like a crime scene.
After about one and a half hours of gingerly cleaning my wound, I studied my backside carefully.
And, I kid you not, my left buttock looked exactly like the side profile of Pac Man.
It was a hauntingly interesting visual.
The cavity of my left buttock looked as if it could nicely fit a generous slice of birthday cake.
I tried very hard to estimate the size of the cavity and finally, decided that the best description would be that I could horizontally fit in five malleable HB pencils into it.
The idea of carving out all my flesh and leaving the wound open, according to my doctor, is so that I can get rid of the abscess once and for all.
It would then allow the flesh to grow back, by way of granulation, so that the healing is more natural.
And as I type this, I am recovering from a minor surgery that could potentially be abscess-related.
This time though, I'm nipping the problem in the bud - getting rid of a cyst at the back of my neck that's starting to get bigger and more inflamed.
And this lookback at my 2011 surgery reminds me that if I could recover well from that, I too, can for this op.
Though I'm not sure if you could recover from the images I've just put in your head from this blog post.
