Out, Damned Spot! Chapter 2
How It's Going.
Content Warning: Extreme body horror, graphic self-harm and amputation, graphic violence and murder, strong language, intense psychological distress. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Previous Chapter:
(Still with me, you glorious lunatics? Buckle up.)
“Mr. Ericson, can I call you Joe?”
I nodded.
“Well, Joe, I need you to remain calm while I take a look at what you’ve done here,” one of the paramedics said, untying my shoelace on my left foot.
I lurched up, but the restraints held me in place.
“Please,” I pleaded. “Don’t do that. I’m begging. Just get me to the hospital, I need them to stop the itching.”
“This looks pretty bad,” the paramedic said, motioning his partner to come take a look as he cut the bloody sock from my foot. “Did you do this to yourself?”
“Yes, but… I know what it looks like. I had to make it stop.”
My foot was red up to my ankle with blood from the metal I wedged into my sock. To my surprise, it hadn’t embedded fully into my foot and fell off when the paramedic touched it with his gloved fingers.
“Please don’t!” I yelled. The tickling and itching were already starting to come back. “I need that! It’s the only thing that stops the itching.”
I grinded my teeth and panted, straining against my restraints as the needle pricks of pain dotted my foot and the itching became unbearable. I tried twisting my foot to rub my toe against the railing of the gurney, but it didn’t reach. There was no way to scratch it; I was fucked.
All I could figure was the receptionist at the Urgent Care called them back after I stepped out of the lobby and told them I was acting crazy. Or, maybe they saw me twitching and stomping my foot with a bloody sock and smelling like the smegma scraped from the jowls of a basset hound and drew their own conclusions about my mental state.
“We’ll get you cleaned up, don’t worry, sir. We’ll have you at the hospital in no time.”
He patted me on the shoulder as they loaded me into the back of the ambulance and closed the door. One of them stayed in the back with me and worked on cleaning and dressing my wound while the other one climbed into the cab. He worked so gingerly around the spot that even his attempts to clean me up didn’t help with the itching. If anything, that fucker made it itch worse with what he was doing.
“Can you give me something?” I pleaded, rocking against my restraints and bobbing my head, gritting my teeth as the itching on my foot continued, powerless to scratch it. “Can you numb my foot? Make it stop, please? I’m begging you to make the itching stop!”
“We can, but first you have to tell us what you took,” he said.
“What I took? What do you mean?”
“What drugs are you on?” he asked. “We need to know before we can give any medication. We don’t want it to react with anything already in your system.”
“Honestly, I didn’t take anything,” I said. I could feel spit dripping down my chin, my lips quivering from the awful itch. “I’m just itching terribly, and I need it to stop. That’s why I did what I did to my foot, it stinks and itches so bad. I just need something to numb it so the itching stops. Please can you numb it?”
“Not until we get a tox screen,” he said as he wrapped a bandage around my foot. “We don’t know what else you’ve got in your system.”
I lurched up in my restraints and screamed. “You daft cunt, I am NOT a fucking drug addict! I am a server technician for an engineering firm downtown. I told you I woke up with this spot on my foot, and it started to smell, and then it itched so bad that I scratched it raw. Fucking help me, please!”
(NOTE: I want to add here that I actually did call him a daft cunt; that isn’t writer’s embellishment. I know it’s common for writers to add embellishments, insert clever phrases, or tweak the narrative slightly to make themselves look better when telling a true story, but that was 100% honest-to-God true. I pulled ‘daft cunt’ out of the deep recesses of my brain. And here now, as I write this for your enjoyment, my fucking foot is itching like mad. I need you all to understand that I said that. Me. When I was in the moment and at my wits’ end, I called that smug asshole prick a daft cunt. Please believe me and don’t question it. I’ve had my sanity questioned so much since this began that I need someone to believe me, even something as little as calling someone a daft cunt. If you doubt that I said he was a daft cunt, maybe you’ll doubt that my foot actually itches. Maybe you’ll think this is all bullshit. But it’s not. He was a daft fucking cunt, and my fucking foot itches. All of this is true.)
“Mr. Ericson, I need you to remain calm. We’ll have you at the hospital soon enough.”
The ambulance lurched forward as the driver started towards the hospital. Even from the back, I could hear him radio the hospital to let them know they were en route with me. I didn’t understand all of the verbiage, but they were pretty much treating me like a self-harming drug addict.
I took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm myself so I could communicate rationally. “Please, I am not crazy, you have to understand that. I am not on drugs. And I…”
A sharp needle prick twisted into my foot, making me twitch and squeeze my eyes closed until it passed. I continued, “I am sorry I called you a daft cunt, I really didn’t mean that. I am in extreme discomfort. I don’t know what’s happening to me and…”
Another sharp jab, I clenched my jaw and rocked against my restraints, sucking my breath through my teeth, sounding like I’m practicing Lamaze breathing. “I need help. I need the itching to stop. It’s itching, oh fucking God it’s itching, please I beg you, please numb it or do something to stop the itching! Please? Please? Please!”
The paramedic knocked on the window of the cab, leaning forward to talk to the guy in the front. Again, I can’t hear all of what’s spoken, but it didn’t sound like my pleas are getting me anywhere.
“Oh, fuck you, fuck both of you, and fuck Dawn and her saggy tits! Fuck Urgent Care and fuck hospitals! You aren’t fucking helping me, you’re killing me. Can’t you see that? You’re killing me! You’re supposed to help me!”
(NOTE: Just like before with the ‘Daft cunt’ comment, I really did say that about Dawn. I’m sure she’s good at her job, and in light of my appearance, she behaved as any rational adult would. I can’t even say for certain that her tits were saggy. She was a full-bosomed woman, but her tits weren’t nicely big; they were just large and maybe a bit sloppy. Fuck, I’m making it worse, aren’t I? Just fucking forget it. Her tits were fine.)
I don’t know what it was, but at that moment, feeling my foot on fire, throbbing in pain, itching like mad, and me unable to do anything about it, I started laughing. It was funny, right? I’m sure I sounded crazy, screaming about my itching foot, my ankle bathed in blood, and me trying to rationalize digging a piece of metal into my foot. That’s fucking nuts, right? Who in their right mind would do what I have done, and who the fuck would listen to me and not think I was fucking insane?
Maybe this is how people go crazy, I thought. Every time I’ve passed a homeless person muttering under his breath or swatting at something that wasn’t there, that’s who I am to everyone else. The things they saw, the voices they heard, maybe they’re just as real as the itch in my foot.
My laughter subsided into sobs. Fuck all, right? There’s no way I’m not headed up to the psych ward now, especially once the drug screen comes back empty. I’m going to end up going mad from this itching cocksucker foot, and there’s not a single fucking thing I can do about it.
We arrived at the hospital, me still strapped in the gurney, sobbing lowly with the intermittent lurch and twitch when I felt a needle prick into my skin. The nurses rechecked my blood pressure and asked me what drugs I had taken, and helped me piss in a jug for a drug test. They wouldn’t even undo my hands to let me take my own dick out. It was humiliating.
My tremors got worse as the itching continued. As I waited, I tried doing my deep breathing exercises, but they didn’t really help for shit. I didn’t stay in the ER area long, as they moved me to a private room on the 8th floor. I’m not sure if this was the psych ward or just a random empty corner of the hospital for me to stink up on my own without bothering anyone. At least they left the television on.
I met with two counselors, a psychiatrist, numerous nurses and orderlies, and watched four episodes of Family Feud on the television before my tox screen came back clean. Only then would anyone fucking believe me about the itching. The smell, they had no problem understanding; that was pretty evident. The doctor finally made his way to my bed around 9 pm, almost eleven hours after I had arrived at the ER.
“We’re sorry that it’s taken so long to get to you, but you’ll have to understand that the way you came in was quite peculiar. Let’s have a look, shall we?”
The doctor and his nurse removed the bandage wrapped around my foot. The cool air hitting the skin on my toe brought on another needle jab of pain that made me lurch against my restraints. He rubbed his gloved fingers around the spot on my toe and the hole I had torn in my foot with that metal piece from my server rack. My eyes rolled back a little at the tiny bit of relief his fingers gave.
“It appears you have quite the nasty infection, Mr. Ericson. Looks to be fungal, possibly bacterial. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen anything like this before. Have you recently traveled to any third-world countries?”
I shook my head. The doctor didn’t seem put off by the smell, but the nurse was wincing and breathing through her mouth to avoid inhaling any of my scent.
(NOTE: Last one, I promise. Seriously, this motherfucking doctor was baller. After a day of being surrounded by people who couldn’t be in the same room as me without gagging, this motherfucker just strolled in calm and smooth like I smelled like a fucking field of roses. If there was a James Bond equivalent of a doctor, this guy was it. All I can figure is this guy must’ve seen some shit in his day as an ER doctor. Some straight up warzone pus infected sucking chest wound level of trauma not to be affected by my rotting stankfoot.)
“I’ll prescribe a topical ointment and some antibiotics. And a tetanus shot for that cut in your toe. It looks like it should heal on its own, but we can stitch it closed if you’re concerned about it opening back up.”
“Will you numb it before you give me stitches?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Stitch that motherfucker closed.”
(NOTE: I know I said the last one was the last one, but that was an awesome thing to say, right? Again, I really said that. Not embellishment.)
When the doctor jabbed the needle into my foot to numb it for the stitches, I almost cheered. No pain, no itching, no pricks in my skin, causing muscle spasms —just nothing. Blissful nothing. I felt my sanity returning.
The ointment had a slight, perfumed aroma, but nothing that would cover up the smell. The doctor didn’t have any insight into the smell other than to say it was a symptom of the infection. The lab took swabs to analyze and determine what it was. Maybe once they knew exactly what it was, they could provide me with something better.
It was almost midnight when they finally released me from the hospital. I took a cab home; the driver refused at first because of the smell, but I gave him a twenty up front as a tip. I was exhausted, sweaty, and, thankfully, numb in my foot. I got home and took my antibiotics, foregoing the ointment until the morning because I needed to sleep.
As quickly as sleep came, it was stolen by the dull tickle of a feather rubbing over my foot as the feeling returned to it. Soon after, the needle pricks resumed. I went ahead and put the ointment on, hoping it might help stop the itching, but it only made it worse.
I called the hospital and told them what was happening, but they said I had to wait for the antibiotics and ointment to take effect before they would see me again. I asked that the doctor who treated me call me back when he returned the next day, which wouldn’t be until 3 pm.
I ripped the stitches out from rubbing it into the carpet in an attempt to stop the itching. I slept maybe 10 minutes. And as bad as that was, it wasn’t even the worst of it.
When I turned on the light the next morning, I found three more spots on my foot.
To be continued next week in Part 3: How It Escalated
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Left me hanging again!! Gonna be a tough wait until part 3…
"Stankfoot".🤣🤣I wonder what it says about me that I find this story hilarious. It has to be the way you're telling it. The asides are so funny! That being said, I'm dying to find out what is happening to this poor guy's foot. Is he turning into a zombie?