IHS8

11/9/11

Back to Garry Weston Centre at Hammersmith for my three monthly blood test.
While I was in there I asked dear Dr. Blagdon to have a butchers at my butchered belly, with its still bleeding wound.
She looked at it and immediately said, “Oh, you’ve got a keloid. Most unusual, you only normally see them on Africans.”
When I got home I naturally looked it up on line – “Keloid or Crabclaw,” a benign tumour forming on a wound through infection and the over production of collagen.
It was first written up in medical notes in Egypt in 1700BC and named in Europe in 1806.
The lurid photos on line with people with things like purple potatoes hanging from their ear lobes, slaves who’d been flogged and the whip marks had formed intaglio patterns, and necks with swollen lesions were much worse than mine, some small comfort.
Hearing this was all a bit much. What strange thing is my body doing now?! Instead of going to a reading of the Tempest I slipped home and hid myself away.