Around this time last year I had surgery on my leg to treat a spider bite which had swollen up to resemble a ping pong ball embedded in my left thigh. The doctor scooped out the "walls of infection" leaving a hole in my leg deep and wide enough to fit my index and middle finger into. It looked like my leg was screaming at me for having gotten bit, with an angry, blood soaked mouth. The doctor didn't stitch it up though; he explained to me that wounds like this had to heal from the bottom up. He instead packed the hole with gauze and instucted me to clean it out with a saline solution four times a day, repacking it with fresh gauze each time.
The first time I did it on my own, I nearly passed out, but gradually I began to get acquainted with my wound; I'd stare down at it for several minutes before packing it with gauze. With trepidation I'd put a finger inside it, amazed that it didn't make contact with the fleshy walls within my thighs. Eventually the muscle regenerated high enough that it was no longer necessary to pack it, and I would occasionally peel the sterile covering back to check on it's progress. I had a mixture of fascination and repulsion at this gash that culminated one night with a guy pal of mine--I must have not taped up the gauze pad too well, because at the most inopportune moment I felt the slight sting of cold air hit my injury. I glanced over at my straddled leg to see that the tape had come loose and the gauze had fallen away and the thing, which was now a dark, almost fuschia shade gazing up at me. Common sense said to get up and put the bandage back on, but then irrationality suddenly kicked in and prevailed, and I realized that I was actually into this.
Somehow it was so disgusting that it was alluring, and it added to the moment. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not about to go and willfully inflict another painful gash on myself, but at the time I was turned on all the more by it!
What is that about? I don't know, I mean, it's been a year now since that happened, and I'm still left with an unsightly dimple on my leg. The dimple doesn't intrigue me the way the gaping wound did. I began to wonder if it was possible to have a wound fetish. A quick search on the internet yielded no results--I kept getting all these vampire roleplaying, blood drinking fetish sites. Not exactly what I had in mind. A friend of mine suggested I try medical or trauma fetish, and I came across some sort of dictionary site that named "Munchausen's Syndrome: the act of being aroused by reopening a wound." This was a bit perplexing since as far as I'd always heard, Munchausen's Syndrome was some type of hypochondria where the patient not only thinks they're ill, but actually does things to expose themself to sickness or injury. (At least it's not as bad as Munchausen's Syndrome By Proxy, where the freak inflicts injury on a second party, usually a child.)
Munchausen or no, I've had fun with it. I played it up while go go dancing at a now defunct after hours club called Art Space; the gauze, which seemed to constantly be spotted red from blood that would seep through if I put my weight on it for more than 5 minutes at a time. I could barely walk, so this made for an interesting situation with gimp go go dancing, gyrating my midsection mostly while leaning against a railing for support. The crowd dug this, but then again, Art Space was the kind of lackadaisical place where the crowd dug anything, so no one said anything when after about an hour I opted to sit on the platform instead, listen to a sunken eyed girl bitch about a notorious local figure whom she'd just had a disastrous fling with.
My leg is still healing now, but the wound has since closed up and faded into an unsightly, salmon colored dimple. If it doesn't fade any more, maybe I'll get some sort of tattoo to hide it.Maybe of a red mouth with huge fangs?
WBDD MAIN PAGE