But Avarie, If I told that story, I might spawn a whole new disgusting pimple thread, and Coldfire would lose her (his?) lunch. And if enough people know, I might have to change my story when people ask me, “where’d you get that scar?”
Go ahead and share the story. Coldfire can take it 
:Runs away before he can catch me:
Sock Munkey, the blimp article was published in Aerostat, a British blimping magazine. I wanted to see a copy, so I emailed the editor asking how to purchase it. She said it didn’t really have a price, because is was mostly subscription, but she just sent me a copy for free!
I told Scylla in the thread that now I know his real name, and he replied “That’s too bad. Now I have to hunt you down and kill you.”
Okay, Meros and Avarie, this is a major hijack to my own thread, but here goes:
I was 17. It was my senior year in high school. Some friends and I had been down at the playground in Yeager Park, kicking back a few (okay, a LOT of) Natty Lites (we were 17, okay?). Suffice it to say, we were wasted off our asses. I made it home that night, managed to make it upstairs without waking up my parents, and was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and washing my face when I realized the source of this pain in my shoulder that had been bugging me all evening. I had a zit. A rock-hard, throbbing, thumbnail-sized sumbitch, located directly underneath the bra strap on my right shoulder. Every time I moved my arm, the bra strap would rub against it and send pain shooting through my back.
I think, “Aha! This little bitch is so big and sore, surely if I just squeeze it, it will pop and relieve the pressure.”
I squeeze, eliciting a gasp of pain. It has brought tears to my eyes. But I’m still drunk, and I honestly don’t think I can get to sleep with this throbbing boil on my shoulder (ironic, as you will see later), so I squeeze some more. Involuntary tears are now trickling down my cheeks, in spite of the deadening effects of the alcohol. Still nothing. “What now?” I say to myself. I have it! I’ll just nip into the hall, grab one of my mother’s sewing needles, and lance the sucker. No problem! I’ve done it several times before, and it has never failed to relieve pressure, usually accompanied by that oddly satisfying splurch of an exploding zit.
I paw through my mother’s sewing box, convenienty right outside the bathroom door, and find the biggest needle in there, an embroidery one that is about the length of my little finger. In my drunken state, I’m thinking, “This is a Big Fucking Zit, it obviously requires a Big Fucking Needle.” Brandishing my weapon, I return to the bathroom and attempt the lancing.
Only problem is, the angle’s kind of weird. Ever tried to lance a zit on your own shoulder? I climbed up on the counter to get a better angle. My leverage is not very good, but I manage to poke the thing. It hurts like a son of a bitch, but I eagerly remove the needle and squeeze, thinking I’m in for some exploding pus and serious relief of pressure. Nothing. I decide to try the needle again. At this point, I’ve climbed onto the bathroom counter in order to better stab this thing, but this is an especially stubborn zit. I sink the needle into the middle. I feel a little resistance, like there’s another zit underneath the first one. No wonder it hurt so much! I sink the needle a little further. There’s a little pop!, but then I meet a little more resistance, like there’s a third zit under the first two. I’m making progress now. At this point the needle is over halfway into my shoulder. I give it a really hard shove, just for good measure, and to make sure I’ve thoroughly lanced the thing and…
SNAP!
The needle has broken off, halfway down, with the bottom half sticking out of my shoulder. I see it for a brief moment, sticking out of my skin, but as I reach over to extract it–SLURP! It gets sucked down into the recesses of the monster zit. Seriously, it was like watching it get sucked into quicksand, only it’s my friggin’ SHOULDER. The needle is now entirely beneath my skin, but I can feel it sticking up. Now the damn thing REALLY hurts, and I think, “Well, shit.”
After a couple of minutes of poking and prodding, I discover that it has moved away from the original point of entry because of the odd angle at which I was attempting this operation. It ain’t coming out. Then I think, “Well, SHIT!!! There’s a fucking NEEDLE buried in my SHOULDER! What the hell do I do??”
I consider my options. I can tell my mother, but it’s about 3 in the morning by now, and I’m still not very sober. My mother has no idea I’ve been drinking, has no idea I’ve ever touched alcohol, and would kill me if I woke her up drunk in the wee hours of the morning, drunk, with a needle buried in my shoulder.
Shall I continue?
But of course. This is just getting good 
oops–I just noticed I repeated myself a couple of times there. Did I mention I was drunk?
Okay, so at this point, I’m inebriated and topless, sitting on the bathroom counter with a needle buried in my shoulder, and it ain’t coming out. I decide that if I go to bed, maybe this will all turn out to have been a drunken hallucination, and the needle will magically disappear by morning. Didn’t get much sleep that night, since I sleep on my side, and I kept accidentally rolling over onto the shoulder with the needle in it. Needless to say, it was still there in the morning. It is still there Monday morning when I go back to school.
As I’m walking around, I notice that I can SEE the needle, sticking up under my skin, but it won’t come out. Like I said, the whole thing had shifted away from the point of entry. I go to work in the afternoon (I was a hostess), and by the end of my shift I’m starting to panic. I called my parents to say I was going to cover another girl’s shift and that I would be late, and I drove myself to the emergency room. I’m hoping that I can just have the nice doctors anonymously remove the needle–it can’t be that hard, right? And I can just pay them in cash, with no one the wiser. So I’m sitting in the emergency room, filling out the paperwork. I decide to put a fake name on the form–I don’t want ANYONE to find out about this, especially not my parents, but I put my real address, figuring that if they had to send me a bill or something, my parents would just think it was a mistake, throw it away, and I could retrieve it and pay it. But what do I write under “Complaint?” “Big Fucking Needle Buried in Shoulder,” pretty much, minus the profanity.
Finally, I’m called into an examining room, and explain my problem to the doctors. I leave out the part about being wasted and how my parents have no idea I’m here. They basically tell me that they can’t operate without insurance, and I’m sure as hell not going to use my parents’ insurance for this, since I’m trying my damnedest not to let them know anything has happened. But while they’re discussing how to help me, one doctor says, “Well, it looks like it’s right under the surface. We could probably make an incision here–” I wince as he touches my shoulder --" and just pull out the needle."
At this point I have a bright idea. I can’t let these guys help me, because they’ll tell my parents, but that procedure doesn’t sound terribly difficult. I have an exacto knife at home–why don’t I just perform minor surgery on my OWN shoulder, at home, in my bathroom, to extract the needle? Brilliant! Nothing can go wrong with this plan! I’ve hit upon the solution!
So I thank the doctors and drive home. I mumble something to my parents about being tired, and rush upstairs. I’m desperate to get this thing out of my back. I find my exacto knife, sterilize it, remove my shirt, and climb back onto the bathroom counter. I’m ready. I can see the little sucker sticking up out of my shoulder. I make an incision directly over the bump, thinking that the needle will just fall into my hand. To my surprise, it doesn’t. I bleed a lot, is all. But what went wrong? Why didn’t the needle just pop out? Maybe if I try a transverse cut, making an “X” with the first cut. I do so. I bleed a hell of a lot more. Nothing. I try one more cut, and when nothing happens, I finally come to my senses and realize that I’d better stop mangling my shoulder. I clean and bandage the wound, and go to my room to think.
I come up with nothing.
The entire week, I walk around with this thing in my shoulder. The next week is spring break. My long-distance boyfriend is coming into town to visit, and I really don’t want to mess up our week together. So I do nothing.
That’s right. I walked around for two weeks with this needle in my shoulder, and I didn’t tell a soul.
The boyfriend leaves. School starts again. I’ve almost gotten used to the constant throbbing pain in my shoulder. Wearing my backpack on one shoulder (the one without the Big Fucking Needle in it, obviously) is now automatic. However, I realize that this is getting ridiculous. Obviously, I need medical attention, but I still don’t want to tell my mom HOW this happened. So I make up a lie.
I’m in a play at the time, and I tell my mother that one of the costumers must have been sewing on the couch in the theater, and left a needle in the cushion. I come along, fling myself on my back on the couch and–HOLY SHIT, IS THAT A NEEDLE THAT JUST SNAPPED OFF IN MY SHOULDER??
My mother, understandably, freaks out. She freaks out even more when I reluctantly admit that I tried unsuccessfully to cut the needle out of my own shoulder (she’s pretty squeamish). She immediately makes me a doctor’s appointment, and we go see my family physician. To my very great surprise, no one questions my story.
Oh, but there’s more…
HEY!!! Where’s the rest of the story?
The doctor and nurse hem and haw, and decide that they’re going to have to cut. They get me on the table, have me remove my shirt, and use local anasthetic on my shoulder. Ah, blessed relief! I can feel them slicing away, but it doesn’t hurt a bit! For the first time in 3 weeks, I can’t feel the Big Fucking Needle sticking out of my shoulder. Even better is the knowledge that I’m about to be rid of the thing forever.
Man, what’s taking them so long?
The doctor pulls the nurse over to the side, and they hold a whispered conference.
“Ummm…doctor?” I ask. “Is there a problem?”
The doctor returns, and shakes his head grimly.
“I’m afraid that we, um, can’t find the needle.”
“But it’s sticking out of my skin! You can see the lump it makes! I can FEEL it!”
“Apparently, what we thought was the needle is where the needle USED to be. The matter around the needle calcified, making that hard lump, and then the needle must have shifted. I’m going to have to send you to a plastic surgeon.”
Shit. This day just keeps getting better and better.
This doctor was incredibly nice, by the way. He performed minor surgery on my back, but felt so bad that he couldn’t help me that he didn’t even charge us for an office visit. Luckily, we were able to get in to see the plastic surgeon later that day.
I’ve never been in a plastic surgeon’s office. One entire wall is a waterfall. Everything is black, glossy veneer, covered with photos of beautiful people who have been nipped and tucked. My mom and I are called into the surgeon’s office. My mom explains the problem:
“She has a needle in her shoulder, and Dr. X couldn’t get it out. See, there, under the bandage, he tried to cut it out, but–”
At this point the doctor pulls off the bandage.
“You mean this needle?” He asks. Apparently, all of Dr. X’s poking and slicing and prodding has done some good after all. The needle has worked itself loose, and is stuck to the bandage the plastic surgeon has just removed. The needle is 3/4 of an inch long. He wrapped it in tape and gave it to me for a souvenir. I carried it around in my wallet for a while, and showed it to people to gross them out.
Cost of minor surgery, anasthesia, office visit to first doctor: $0.
Cost of bandaid removal at plastic surgeon’s: $65. He didn’t even stitch this gaping, bleeding, 3" wound closed, thus ensuring that I would have a big ugly scar (the scar turned out to be about 2" long), and he was a PLASTIC SURGEON.
Moral: Do not EVER try to lance a zit while intoxicated.
To this day my mom likes to tell this story, especially to new boyfriends. She takes this sick pride in my pain tolerance.
“October has this INCREDIBLE pain threshold! Once she got a needle stuck in her back, walked around with it for weeks, and tried to cut it out herself…”
She continues with the story, giving all the details of how I got the needle stuck there (which she still doesn’t know I’ve made up), and on and on, while I turn redder and redder and try to change the subject.
Congratulations; I’ve never told anyone the truth of the two inch scar on my back before. I just hope it doesn’t get back to my mom.
But did you ever get the satisfaction of having the zit pop?
The Great One makes his appearance at last, in thread dedicated to him! And, to answer your question, O Funniest Man Alive (aka Scylla)–no, the zit NEVER DID POP. I think that was the worst part. After all the humiliation, the lies, the pain–the stupid zit never even popped. I did not even receive that small satisfaction. I guess it just sort of went away after the slicing began.
Every good story should include this phrase.
Bravo. Thanks for sharing.
October:
Thank you. You spin a mean yarn yourself.
Something bothered me about your story (other than the masochistic psychosis.)
Now that I’ve finally put my finger on it, I have one word for you:
Magnet.
Big Powerful Mother Magnet.
Now WHY didn’t I think of that?
October!
Put in Google:
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and You are lost!
You get some 13.000 boards or something like that.
I live only to suck the souls out of random internet users like yourself.
But don’t feel too bad, C, your soul is right up on the top shelf next to the fish head and the floating sand timer.
I know better than to even try it.
sigh speaking of hijacking October’s thread…
I, of course, read the blimp story (not knowing it was from here, found my way to get hooked here through other routes --… fate? makes ME a believer)
Anyway, I read the famous blimp story, and my friends are still laughing their arses off at me. What did >>I<< see in the story?
“Wow! They have those blimps on SALE at Zanie!”
Several hours on the phone later, and my brother had an early birthday present on it’s way from the store in K.C., My father had his B-day present coming from the store in Phoenix, my friends C and L had timely and late (respectively) birthday presents headed to them from two different stores in LA and I had one on it’s way to me from one of the LA stores. ( … had to search them out a bit… )
And what does Chris’s wife do? Sneaks the blimp into the guest room while I’m sleeping and launches it in my direction …
Ya know that security guy, the one reading the magazines …
Sometimes I am SUCH a Guy!!!