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
