Don't read this if you're easily grosed out.

It started the day before yesterday. I felt this weird prickly sensation in my face. Something was off, and I just knew my face would have a little surprise for me the next morning.

"A little surprise" was kind of an underestimation. A zit the size of a tomato was throbbing right below my right eye.. Not a small, cutesy dot with a white head on top ready to pop out. No, the thing looked like a nipple, glowing bright red like a traffic light and probably still expanding as I studied it in the mirror and analyzed the damage it would do to the aesthetics of my face.

The only thing that mattered to me was; how are people at work going to respond to this ? I have students at my desk all the time, and I need to look them straight in the eye when I do my interviews. With this boil of puss throbbing in my face I was not going to be taken seriously. So my immediate reaction was: how well can I cover this up. I thought of massaging it, hoping that it would shrink in size, but it didn't. Instead, it started to swell even more. I panicked and called my friend Els, who lives about a block away, told her about my pimple emergency and asked her if she had some cover up make-up. I felt like a junkie looking for a quick fix. Luckily she did.

I applied a thick layer of brown make-up to the bump on my face. It was still visible, but it would need a trained eye to notice. I prayed that with a day of not touching the thing, it would be ready to pop out by dinner making it able to heal overnight and be done with it in the morning.

But that night it was still there, alive and kicking - man, how it was throbbing - and there was no white stuff surfacing at all. My friend Lore recommended putting some toothpaste on it; she said she'd learned that this dries out zits. So I did. I went to sleep with a dash of minty fresh toothpaste on my cheek and slept like a baby.

The next morning, as I raised my hand to ground zero on my face, the first thing I noticed was how swollen my cheek still felt. I peeled myself from my bed, hurried my way to the bathroom and freaked - out. Not only was that that zit still there, I now had a bag under my right eye the size of a water balloon. It looked like someone had punched me in the face last night.

So right now, as I'm typing this, my eye is swollen, there's a big boil of puss waiting to give birth, and I have two pledgets sticking out of my nostrils because I still have a freaking cold and snot is running out of my nose.

What a hell of a week this is.