Yuck
August 30, 2004 3:08 PM   Subscribe

Womans flesh grows over her wedding ring via waxylinks
posted by bob sarabia (38 comments total)
 
That is fucking n-a-s-t-y.
posted by ao4047 at 3:11 PM on August 30, 2004


No, it's sad.
posted by Asparagirl at 3:18 PM on August 30, 2004


AAAUUUUGH
posted by jimmy at 3:19 PM on August 30, 2004


Somebody please explain to me how this happened. Please use tiny words so that I can understand. Thank you!
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:23 PM on August 30, 2004


It can be both nasty and sad. Which it is.

Also, just a tiny tiny bit cool. In a freaky kind of way.
posted by Bonzai at 3:23 PM on August 30, 2004


Could be worse...

/someone had to.
posted by Space Coyote at 3:26 PM on August 30, 2004


Ring lady, meet couch woman. I'm sure you two have lots to bond over.
posted by stonerose at 3:26 PM on August 30, 2004


/sometwo had to!
posted by stonerose at 3:27 PM on August 30, 2004


Not to derail with yet another Sick/Sad News Item (S/SNI), but I'm suprised this story hasn't at least made Fark yet. Oy.
posted by dhoyt at 3:33 PM on August 30, 2004


A summary of foreign body granulomas. For some people if the immune system can't get rid of an irritating foreign object, it just grows around it.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:34 PM on August 30, 2004


Eww... How do you remove something like that? Do you drain it?
posted by kindle at 3:59 PM on August 30, 2004


I lost my wedding band but I am fairly certain it is not under my skin.

Investigations confirmed the diagnosis of hypothyroidism and indicated anaemia due to iron deficiency…

Though not deficient of gold!
posted by Dick Paris at 4:02 PM on August 30, 2004


A summary of foreign body granulomas. For some people if the immune system can't get rid of an irritating foreign object, it just grows around it.

I still have little bits of glass in my right hand from when I punched a hanging light fixture in 1978 (back in my not-too-wise drunken stupor days). About every two to three years a little bit of glass starts poking its head out, long enough for me to grab it with a tweezers. I've heard stories of this type of thing before and it's sort of fascinating it read about.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 4:09 PM on August 30, 2004


Cut it off and graft some skin over it.

I have small one from a stupid ear piercing during my misspent youth that is waiting for a few hundred dollars of spare cash to pay a dermatologist. Usually these are not a big deal.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 4:13 PM on August 30, 2004


Womans flesh grows over her wedding ring
Somebody please explain to me how this happened.

Me too...since the ring is on her right hand.
posted by thomcatspike at 4:33 PM on August 30, 2004


not what I expected. And thourogly creepy. Also, the woman was skitso.
posted by delmoi at 4:42 PM on August 30, 2004


Histopathological examination of the lump revealed a foreign body granuloma with chronic low-grade Staphylococcus aureus infection.

Whew! My wedding ring's platinum.
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:10 PM on August 30, 2004


Thomcatspike, there are many religious and ethnic groups who believe that the right hand is the correct hand for the wedding ring, and that those of us who wear them on the left hand are barbarians.

Given that this woman is Australian, I'm guessing she might have been raised in one of the Eastern Orthodox churches, where the convention is for right-hand wedding rings.
posted by Sidhedevil at 5:12 PM on August 30, 2004


KirkJobSluder: Thank you. Somehow, knowing how it happened makes it a little less gross. Poor lady!
posted by Joey Michaels at 5:24 PM on August 30, 2004


My Grandma still has gravel in her knee, from falling down in the 30's.
posted by sadie01221975 at 5:37 PM on August 30, 2004


from falling down in the 30's

Yes, often the low 30's engender the creation of ice, which can lead to falling down.
posted by drinkcoffee at 5:45 PM on August 30, 2004


Actually, it's not related solely to "being fat" (couch woman) or just an irritating foreign object (granuloma). In this case, it's a combination of the two, directly related to her hypothyroidism. What made me notice this was the phrase "edema" which is traditionally related to any swelling. As a person with chronic urticaria, I have experienced angioedema which is swelling of the facial features, hands, and feet. (My c.u. is not thyroid-related, although there are people with thyroid conditions who also experience chronic hives.)

So it is entirely the thyroid condition that is the root cause of this gruesome spectacle at which we are gawking. The weight gain associated with myxoedema caused the foreign body granuloma, but it was not just one or the other.
posted by etoile at 6:09 PM on August 30, 2004


case closed!
posted by bob sarabia at 10:13 PM on August 30, 2004


would the hypothyroidism or the myxoedema be responsible for making her skin so old and wrinkly...? i mean she's only 44, and that looks like the hand of an 80 year old.
posted by t r a c y at 10:34 PM on August 30, 2004


I think some dish soap will slide that thing right offa there.
posted by sharpener at 10:36 PM on August 30, 2004


just wondering, but why does the x-ray not jibe with the photos, as far as where the ring is in the x-ray?
posted by efalk at 10:50 PM on August 30, 2004


my bad. i realized my mistake
posted by efalk at 10:52 PM on August 30, 2004


I have a pencil lead in my thumb from grade school and some fragments of plywood in my shin from the dangerously crappy old Austin municipal skatepark.

Oh, and some thistle needles. A bunch of thistle needles. I bailed out of a rut mountain biking a nice, fast singletrack, choose to aim for whatever it was that was soft, green and fluffy zooming by, and ended up bodily mowing over a fifteen foot long swath of California thistle.

I was all amped from the crash - and feeling all smart for avoiding road rash by molesting the flora - until I got up and tried to grab my handlebars and realized I was a human pincushion. My shorts, shirt and socks were literally stapled and pinned to me.

Spent about two hours trailside with a friend pulling needles out of me from all over, and to this day once in a while the hard tip of an unassimilated needle will work its way out.

I crashed in the thistle over 5 years ago. I'm glad it wasn't cactus. (Ever see someone's boots get attacked by bottlebrush cactus? Ow. Medic!)
posted by loquacious at 3:34 AM on August 31, 2004


now the preciousssssss will be mine always......gollum..........gollum........
posted by Pretty_Generic at 5:25 AM on August 31, 2004


This is why I take off my wedding ring every day when I shower.
posted by Ynoxas at 6:41 AM on August 31, 2004


Ynoxas, you TAKE OFF YOUR WEDDING RING? Sacrilege!!!

I only take off my band to read the date on the inscription when I get to my anniversary month (",)
posted by DBAPaul at 7:17 AM on August 31, 2004


I guess I win the foreign body sweepstakes. When I was eight or so, I was fishing with my parents and I accidentally stepped on my mom's line as she was baiting her hook. The hook went into her finger, and as you know, those things aren't meant to come out of flesh once they're in. The doctor tried hard, but in wiggling the thing out, he ended up breaking half of it off still inside her.

Thanks to me, to this day there's a tiny piece of metal in my mom's fingertip, which she notices only when it's cold out. Talk about an effective source of guilt.
posted by Epenthesis at 8:20 AM on August 31, 2004


I also have a bit of "foreign body": when I was about to graduate high school, I played a cruel joke on the about-to-be-valedictorian telling her that there had been a mixup and she wasn't graduating first in the class, I was... The next thing I knew, there was a pencil stuck in my face, right next to my nose and about a centimeter below my eye. Scary -- fortunately, I pulled it out without incident. But there's still a visible mark where the lead remained beneath the skin.

What a freak.
posted by elvolio at 9:14 AM on August 31, 2004


Not supposed to pull fishhooks out: you're supposed to push them the rest of the way through.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:40 AM on August 31, 2004


Epenthesis: Your mom is apparently the candidate, homes. You win: no donut. Unless you feel like impaling yourself on something before this thread closes, and body jewelry that forms a fistula through the dermis or epidermis don't count. :)

The trick to removing fish hooks is to cleanly cut it off with enough shaft or curve left to push it all the way through, like a curved sewing needle. Yeah, it'll hurt, but it's better than trying to force it to exit the way it entered. I've done this a couple of times. And it is likely there are pierced people reading this thread that are thinking "Woah, what's the big deal?" while absent-mindedly spinning the CBRs and barbells in their nethers.

To relate to the thread: There's a good chance she injured her hand or ringfinger and was unable to get the ring off. I had another spectacular bike crash once that probably should have killed or paralyzed me, and it involves a ring.

I had forgotten to lock down the front hub on my bike. Road to the corner store. Hopped off a curb. Forks floated off the front axle and came down in the spokes of the now ghost-riding wheel. Instant endo ensues, face makes contact with the ground, momentum of inverted bike still in hands and inverted body pulls me off of my face, and I end up right side up, running and throwing my bike forward. Cheap import generic bike is totaled.

Somehow during all this my hands mashed the ground as well, smashing a ring against my finger. I staggered into the nearest quickie mart dazed and bleeding and demanding to use their restroom to wash up, else I'd stand there and politely bleed on their counter until I passed out. Given the options, they relented, and I was able to wash up and staunch the bleeding, as well as get the ring off my rapidly-swelling finger with some soap and water.

I'm really glad I got that ring off. To this day I doublecheck my bike before riding, and I don't like to wear rings at all.
posted by loquacious at 10:45 AM on August 31, 2004


Oh, and I'm pretty sure sharpener wins. This made me snarfle my beanjuice.
posted by loquacious at 10:48 AM on August 31, 2004


Doctors don't routinely check for thyroid problems - I fell foul of that with a doctor who kept nagging me to lose weight (ignoring all the classic signs of hypothyroidism like dry hair and skin, always being cold and being constantly exhausted) who finally did a blood test and found a TSH greater than 150. My poor thyroid had been battered by EBV when I was 18 and then probably finished off by the dose of radiation that drifted across from Chernobyl. I didn't have a wedding ring to absorb, fortunately!
posted by tabbycat at 11:16 AM on August 31, 2004


I once passed out in the street (not through drink, honest) and woke up with lots of pavement grit in my face.

The kindly nurse advised me to go home and scrub the accompanying still-raw friction burns as hard as I could with a scrubbing brush or some exfoliator, otherwise I would be stuck with a tarmac-speckled face for life. Agony, but I did it with a brush, and am clear of foreign objects.

(the unkindly nurse walked into my cubicle, saw I had a mouthful of blood and said "My God, you look disgusting, you want to clean your mouth out," then walked out again. God bless the NHS.)
posted by penguin pie at 12:39 PM on September 2, 2004


« Older the case of the GPLed shareware   |   Give me the Oscillation Overthruster! Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments