On Being Really Grossed Out Last Night

Miss Edith used to watch a lot of pretty lurid movies; she still reads true crime books; and reading horror fiction -- well, Miss Edith cut her teeth on Stephen King, John Saul, and other joyously trashy writers in that category.
It's true she is a little squeamish in real life: Miss Edith can't stand to see or even hear about things going near people's eyes, which is a problem for Edith herself when she goes to the eye doctor.
But I vividly remember an afternoon when I bought a tuna sub, a foot long, and took it home and sat down with it to watch -- happily -- "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." This was a really, really violent movie, and I placidly watched it while eating my sandwich, and it was only when the movie was over that I realized it was maybe a little bit strange to be able to eat food while watching people get hacked into little bits.

This week Miss Edith watched a movie called "Requiem for a Dream" which came out a few years back; this is a flick about junkies and speed addicts, and I guess it's a love/hate kind of movie. I found it repugnant but at the same time couldn't stop thinking about it, and yesterday I watched the last half hour of it again. Some of the images in it are just crushingly vivid. I don't think I'd recommend this movie to small children, but for adult viewers it's definitely an experience. I mention the movie because there's a few shots in it (no pun intended) that are really not for the squeamish. "Requiem for a Dream" calls for a strong stomach and the ability to not look away even as you're completely horrified, disgusted, and terrified about what godawfulness will happen next.

So yesterday's mail brought me the latest issue of The New Yorker, and in it is an article about itching. I found this amusing, because just a few nights ago Notarius and I were washing dishes together (well, he was washing, I was drying) and we were discussing the nature of an itch: is it a sensation in a unique category or is it really a form of pain, as scientists have said for some time. (I think we agreed it was a form of pain.) The New Yorker article, which was written by Atul Gawande, reports that scientists no longer feel that itching is a form of pain, so clearly Notarius and I were just full of shit.

I began to read the article yesterday evening, as I was waiting for dinner to be ready. Miss Edith fixed herself a nice gin rickey and sat down at the kitchen table to read. The article was fascinating, and I read happily until I got to a segment of it that just cut me off short. I actually, literally, covered my mouth with my hands and cried out, "Oh my god, oh my god."

The passage I'd read described how a woman who had been suffering from a basically pathological need to scratch an itch on her head had awakened one morning to find strange fluid coming from where she'd been scratching. And it turned out she had scratched right through her scalp, through her skull, and into her brain.

God help us all.

What I'm wondering, now, is how many horrified letters The New Yorker will receive about this article. I cannot remember anything else ever printed in there that struck me as being so graphically disgusting. I thought Gawande's article was great, I really did, but, boy howdy: that paragraph really stopped Miss Edith in her tracks.