Saturday, January 22, 2011

Too Much Information

So I got out of the shower and toweled down, looked at my face, looked back at the towel, and... WTF? Why is there fresh red blood in significant amounts on my towel? I don't *feel* like I'm bleeding, nothing's hurt, so what's happening?

Then I remembered what my doctor said about angiomas, which are red vascular masses that appear on the surface of the skin sort of like a wart, except they're made of blood vessels. He said he didn't want to remove the ones I have in various non-obvious places because they bleed like a stuck pig when they're damaged (because they're collections of blood vessels, duh) and they're totally benign, so unless they were bleeding regularly he recommended leaving them alone. So the question was, which one was bleeding?

So I started checking myself out in the mirror, nothing seemed wrong with the ones on my upper body. Then I noticed big blotches of blood on the floor beneath me! So... err.... I checked "the boys", and yeppers, big blotch of blood dripping down ye olde sack, where like a number of middle-aged men I have a collection of small angiomas presenting as small dark bumps. Apparently I had toweled the boys too vigorously when drying off, and disturbed one of these things. A wad of tissue paper to sop up the blood showed a very small hole where one of these things was bleeding, and a surprising amount of blood swiftly poured out to replace what I'd just sopped up -- the boys have a good blood supply, yo. And keeping pressure on it for a few minutes didn't work -- it started bleeding again when I took the tissue off.

So I decided to lie down while applying pressure in order to reduce blood pressure, and was reading the above link (and a number of others) on my iPad while doing so, and that reduction in blood pressure (and reduction in panic level!) did the job. Relieved to find out that I'm not dying... but definitely more information about that area of the body than I wanted to know on a nice Saturday morning!

-- Badtux the Bloody Penguin

9 comments:

  1. So, you was put together wrong? Cuz I don't think most of us experience that.

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  2. Mind sharing your age with us? This is one of those things I've never heard of, but I'm 45 & maybe I should. Because if that happened to me w/o some prior warning, it would freak me the fuck out. I would just assume I'm dying & ask questions later. Glad to hear it's not life-threatening!

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  3. You don't hear much about Kaposi's sarcoma these days. During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, I'd see a fair bit of that in hospitals where I worked in Florida, and there were a few patients who had it when I was in S.F. in the early 2000s. Those sarcomas were no fun, becaise they'd often ooze HIV+ blood. Here's hoping your angiomas have clean blood, Tux.

    And if you want a scary thought, remember that some unfortunate people have INTERNAL angiomas, so the blood seeps out inside them. Huge bruises, sometimes encapsulated bleeding in joints or the abdominal cavity, which causes swelling and pressure on organs... It's a bad thing.

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  4. Dah Sab, if you don't have red "moles" on you, don't worry about it. I discovered the first one the hard way at around 18 or 19 on my head above the hairline by hitting it with a comb and getting plenty of blood from it. None of my doctors have ever been worried about the few scattered here and there (generally barely pin-sized). It's just a blood vessel that has decided to sideline as a mole, is my understanding, they're concerned about dark moles, not the bright red ones. So anyhow, if you're 45 and you don't have these, don't worry about it.

    Bukko, there are certainly diseases that result in what you're talking about, but it's normal for middle-aged white and Japanese dudes to have some of these scattered on the surface. It's just that the boys get a good blood supply and thus if one gets disturbed down there, it's almost as much fun as when the one on my scalp got disturbed when I was 18 or 19 (not much, heh). And yes, I'm quite disease free, thank you... well, other than that disease called "aging", but the alternative ain't so good there.

    - Badtux the TMI Penguin

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  5. I am a walking constellation of both red and dark moles - and these babies aint pin-sized either - and I have never experienced what you describe.

    On the one hand WAAAY TMI, and eeewww; OTOH, good information that for me is not comforting.

    JzB

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  6. You probably never tried to pinch one off thinking it was a seed tick either...

    - Badtux the TMI Penguin

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  7. Well, you got me there . . .

    JzB

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