Organ recital (?)

Patrick (the Born Again Redneck) and I have exchanged a few messages about Organ Recitals (the discussion of those parts of the body which are going to pot).  Though I present them more often than he, he has had some recent opportunities to wax eloquent on the subject.

So far, about the only parts of my body that I haven’t whined about in the blog are probably my hair and my waistline.  (The latter is much too healthy of late.  The rest of me has become so decrepit that I am personally acquainted with MDs in half a dozen specialties spread over three of four states and a cruise ship.

You would never guess what part of me is so troubling that I am thinking of taking it to the doctor-----The fingernail (or at least that part of the body on which it rests, the finger.  Ii have a hangnail that has become infected.  I would have taken it to the doctor before now, but it is embarrassing.   A HANGNAIL??????

I have dosed this dang thing with every cotton pickin’ medicine I could find.  Mercurochrome, triple antibiotic, iodine, peroxide, tea tree oil, I even dipped it in some fungicide.

I know, because I remember, what my dad would have done about the time it got swollen up to a little over one and a half times its normal girth.  He would take out his pocket knife, sterilize the blade with the flame of a match, and give it a good quarter of an inch slice (perhaps incision is a better word), let it bleed and excrete puss, and slap some iodine and a bandaid over it.  I remember two or three back yard surgeries in my pre-teen and teenage years.  It always seemed to work (particularly if the swelling was caused by a sliver or splinter) but I just don’t have the guts.

My mother would have soaked the finger in some kind of stuff that she manufactured that “drew the infection out”.  She also loved some stuff called iodex ointment that was black and smelled a little strong but which really worked on infections (I looked for it in the drugstore, then asked the pharmacist, who laughed aloud)  My mother was also big on gentian violet (what ever that was) which, when applied, stayed for weeks.

I will probably just complain about it a lot, say s**t a lot when I bump it and it will either go away or my wife will put a gun to my head and suggest that even if I am embarrassed I should go to the doctor. (Twenty, thirty, forty bucks to treat a “hangnail”?