That moment of pride when you just compared pus to butter, and now the whole world can understand texture in a new way.
Because we are running out of time (as a species) and food in our stomachs to regurgitate, this will be an abbreviated Dr. Pimple Popper post, focusing on the most grueling pop of the week. But regardless, in this case, it was a series of pops, a fireworks display’s worth of explosions, in which one pop led to another and another and another…
Patient: Patrick from Lincoln, Montana
Condition: The most extreme case of rhinophyma that Dr. Pimple Popper had ever seen.
It went boing?
Patrick reported he started developing a wicked case of rosacea about 15 years ago, after decades of construction work in the sun. About 10 is when his nose swelled up into the hamburger-like state it was in when he approached Dr. PP. Through tears, Patrick’s wife reported that his nose scared children.
How stomach-turning was the treatment?: One time like 10 years ago, I was in an elevator and for 10 seconds I understood foot fetishes. I don’t know how else to explain it, but it felt like an epiphany where I could see exactly where people were coming from—I got it. I didn’t absorb the fetish myself, and the knowingness evaporated almost immediately. (Today, though I only have respect for the foot fetishists out there—follow your dreams like footprints in the sand—I just no longer get it. But whatever, it’s not my fetish to get, and also what do I know? I’m just trying to share a strange, fleeting moment.)
Anyway, in a similar, though already more prolonged, process, I get what “popaholics” see now when they watch stuff like this. The removal of Patrick’s rhinophyma didn’t gross me out at all—and while it didn’t satisfy me, per se, I completely understand why someone would find this satisfying.
It’s something like clearing a field with a scythe. The nose itself was just layer upon layer of pus and sebum ticked in nooks and crannies, as though Patrick’s nose were the creamiest English Muffin in history. Wring out that muffin!!!
The tool Dr. PP used is called a loop electrocautery, which sends an electric current through a loop to make shaving off errant skin growths a snap. I want one.
The results:
Perfect, good as new!
No but for real, the most satisfying thing about this episode was the almost complete restoration of Patrick’s nose.
I know Dr. Lee is a doctor, who takes you through her various diagnoses and processes she performs her extraction and detachment procedures, but this still seems like sorcery to me.
In terms of this week’s food metaphors, we had multiple kinds of butter, bacon bits, and, in a bit of an analogous reversal, an office discussion about making food that looks and pops like the various growths that Dr. Lee removes.
A gross way of realizing a gross linguistic tendency, how innovative.
I also would like to point out that before this episode, there ran an ad for the Dr. Pimple Popper Super Bowl Sunday programming that took Naughty by Nature’s 1991 smash “O.P.P.” and converted it to “D.P.P.” That, of course, stands for Dr. Pimple Popper.
I support everything Dr. Pimple Popper does. I think she’s a gem who legitimately improves people’s lives. But I also think everyone should relax for just, like, a minute or two.