#i really cannot emphasize how much gore and pus there is in this story

[mutant-catgirl-artwork]

FUN WITH A POWER DRILL

Hy guys, I wrote a short story! 

Content warnings: Contains heavy gore, gross bodily fluids, explicit language, some slight alcohol use, and a strawberry liquid breakfast

For the last fucking time, it’s not self-harm! I don’t perform my experiments upon myself with the intent to hurt myself as some kind of act of self-loathing spurred by mental illness or whatever. I’m testing the limits of what I can handle in terms of injury, and thanks to my mutant DNA, I actually heal pretty quickly. Let me explain my side of the story first, will ya?

I honestly didn’t mean to disrupt the class. I value education and I’m really sorry that my accident caused a bit of a kerfuffle amongst the others. I mean, if I had known that what was going to happen was… going to happen, I would have sneezed in the privacy of the school bathroom and then worn some gauze and a surgical mask to class or something. I carry that kind of stuff around with me, don’t act surprised. I’m a mutant, remember?

It all started one evening after my legal guardian had gone to bed. I don’t sleep much, not since the whole mutant thing started- I’m lucky if I get four hours a night, and I try to keep my sleep light because the nightmares are the worst part of the experience. Usually I muck around on the internet or read about stuff. I’m trying to educate myself in rudimentary biology, I don’t want to receive a grade for it because I think that will destroy my curiosity.. I found that I learnt a lot about my own biology using hands-on research… Really hands on. You’ll probably never get to witness your own digestive organs at work in the palms of your hands, but I can tell you right now that once you get over the initial pain, it’s actually really, really cool.

But I digress. I wasn’t playing with my own organs that night… No, on that evening I decided to try my hand at amateur dentistry. After another experiment of mine, which I won’t go into, I had been left with a painful abscess in one of my back teeth. It was on my right side, on the inner side of my gums and it hurt like a bitch. I decided to drain it. Sadly, poking around in there with a safety pin wasn’t doing much, because the abscess was way deeper than a pin could reach, and there were all kinds of fleshy, mouthy bits in the way. All I succeeded in doing was hurting myself non-productively and bleeding everywhere, so I figured I needed to use something a little more extreme.

I, being a self-proclaimed genius, decided to go in there with a power drill. I never use anaesthetic in my experiments, partially because I need to be as alert as possible when doing my thing, and also because I need to build up my pain tolerance. I mean, at the time, teeth drilling sounded like the perfect way to push myself! I remember back before my accident, I had my lower canines taken out without enough anaesthetic and let me tell you, that experience was awful. I’ve progressed since then, I think.

Yes, I waited until my legal guardian was asleep. I don’t like her when she starts worrying, she becomes unbearable… I mean, I’ve tried to kill myself on multiple occasions and if I were a different species, I would have definitely succeeded. This should be an indicator of what I’m capable of withstanding. I stood there, in front of the bathroom mirror, pulled my cheek back, and gave the power drill a few test whirrs. Then, using a sharpie, I marked the area where I thought the abscess would be, judging by contact pain. You know how the ink in sharpies is alcohol based? It tastes like shit, it’s like licking a sanitary wipe and it’s seriously gross as fuck.

I positioned the drill head against my gum, pressed a little bit, and then started the drill. I mean, it hurt like any kind of injury would, but it wasn’t actually that bad- I had thought that drilling an abscessed tooth would hurt a lot more and I was rejoicing my victory. That was when I hit one of my nerves, and the drill… Slipped.

It was kind of a combination of me jumping, banging my elbow against the sink and generally being an idiot that made my drill slip and plunge not into the abscess, but at a diagonal angle, heading more toward my nose than my cheekbone. THAT hurt! The drill didn’t actually pierce my sinuses that time, but it went through the roof of my mouth and didn’t stop until the end was poking out of my face, right next to the bridge of my nose. Blood started pouring out and I was like ‘SHIT’ so I tried to pull the drill out of my face and get some toilet paper to clean it all up, except the drill bit came out of the drill and got stuck in my face.

So there I was, bleeding out of my face and my mouth with a piece of metal jammed in my cranium, the pain was excruciating and I hadn’t even drained the abscess yet! I left the drill in the sink and tiptoed all the way to the storage room so I could get a pair of needle nosed pliers. I then tried to get the drill bit out, while still bleeding profusely in front of the bathroom mirror.

I’m going to say right now that trying to get metal out of bone is really, really hard. It goes in there and it gets stuck so you’re standing there pulling and pulling and pulling and it doesn’t budge even a tiny bit! Then I had a thought: “Hey, what if I widen the hole by wiggling the drill bit diagonally?” And that’s just what I did! I made all my injuries at least 20% worse, the bleeding got really intense and it hurt so much I thought I was gonna pass out. I could actually feel the bones splintering and sticking into my flesh as I was wiggling the bit around, which really wasn’t helping at all.

Eventually, after a lot of wiggling, bleeding and swearing, I got the bloodied drill bit free. I was trying to stop the bleeding with one hand and trying to get the blood off the drill bit with the other, which wasn’t really working. I wasn’t sure how much blood I had lost at that point, but the bathroom looked like a murder scene and I had reached a kind of adrenaline euphoria where I couldn’t feel pain anymore.

I have no impulse control, so naturally I thought “Great! Let’s see if we can get that abscess now!” and after cleaning the drill bit and reattaching it, I decided to try again. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go because my mouth was so full of blood and my pain test of sticking my tongue in my gums wasn’t working. That’s when I made the decision to poke around in there until I struck pus.

After about five attempts, which resulted in me gaining even more injuries, I finally burst the little fucker. You ever witnessed pus exploding out of a really big pimple so quickly that it’s like a chunk of gravel fell out of a sebaceous gland? Yeah, imagine that inside your mouth. I mean, I’m not that squeamish- I’ve read Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Guts’ without even flinching, but exploding bloody pus in your mouth is a very quick way to lose your appetite.

I leaned over the sink to spit as much of the stuff out as I could, but if you’ve ever leant forward while experiencing altered blood pressure, you’ll know that it’s one of the quickest ways to feel really, really dizzy. Combine said blood-loss related dizziness with nausea from having a huge gobbit of pus explode in your mouth, and the fact that a lot of your adrenaline euphoria pain high is starting to run out, and you’ll understood why I fainted at that particular moment in time. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t banged the rest of my face to hell and back on the taps and edge of the sink.

When I came to, it was one hour before I had to go to school, there was blood all over the bathroom, and my face hurt like it had been kicked by a mule. I’m just thankful that I decided to close the bathroom door that night- if my guardian had seen the state I was in, she would probably have taken away my power drills and stuff. I’m surprised she hadn’t woken up when the drilling started with all the noise it made, but maybe she was drunk again. I don’t know.

I distinctly remember pulling myself up off the floor with some difficulty, because all the blood had scabbed and was acting kind of like crusty glue to hold me in place. Have you ever had a blood-nose in your sleep and woken up with blood all over your pillow? It was exactly like that, except instead of a pillow it was a tiled bathroom floor. 

Surprisingly, when I pulled myself up and looked at myself in the mirror, my face had completely healed, and looked fine except for some residual bloodstains. In retrospect, I know that it was only my outer face that had healed and that the inside of my head was in a major state of disrepair, but nonetheless I was shocked to discover that I didn’t even have a bruise! Nothing remained of the injuries I had inflicted upon myself the previous night, though I was still left with a strong ache in my sinuses, which I stupidly had chalked up to phantom pains. I get phantom pains a lot- once, I got disembowelled, and even though I had fully healed I still got tummy aches that were like being stabbed repeatedly in the guts. They were certainly worse than period cramps.

I knew that if my legal guardian saw the amount of blood on the floor, she’d flip her shit, so I took the opportunity to clean as much blood out of the bathroom as possible. I’ve gotten good at cleaning blood up- for future reference, the best way to get blood off a marble or otherwise stone tile floor is to use a sponge with cold water for the majority of the blood, and then you use detergent with a stiff-bristled brush. My head was really starting to pound at that point, so I stupidly took some aspirin and started getting ready for the day.

Huh? Why was taking aspirin stupid? Well, Aspirin has this little side effect where it thins your blood. This makes you incredibly prone to haemorrhage, and you can probably see where this is going. Usually aspirin only affects people if they take a lot of it regularly, but I’m really sensitive to some medication.

I got dressed, grabbed a liquid breakfast for breakfast because I didn’t want to be late or have to chew anything, and headed off to school. All throughout the journey I had been experiencing a sense of discomfort in my nasal cavity, kind of like needing to sneeze a lot, except with a lot more pain. The aspirin just wasn’t cutting it, but I kept soldiering on, walking to school and drinking my strawberry liquid breakfast.

The pain was getting really bad by the time the first lesson rolled around. Just my luck that I had to have Mr Dyssof as the substitute teacher- I don’t know what the hell I did to get on his nerves, but that asshole has some kind of vendetta against me. Maybe it was because I didn’t agree with his opinions regarding polyamory, or maybe it’s because we just have personalities that clash, but either way, if I so much as tap my pencil in class I’m guaranteed to get a detention. I decided to keep quiet, take notes, and try to stay out of his warpath.

It was about 20 minutes into the lesson that the pain became Itchy, you know, kind of like eczema, but in my nose. I wrinkled my nose to try and disperse some of the itch, but if anything it only got stronger. The classroom we were in hasn’t been cleaned in a while, so I’m guessing that it was some stray dust that irritated my nose, but whatever the cause was, I needed to sneeze.

Big mistake. What I thought was going to be a discreet snuffle into my hands turned out to be literally the worst sneeze in my entire life. I remember a sensation of pressure building, lots of things tearing, breaking and snapping inside my face, and then my hands were coated in blood, snot and saliva. 

My face pretty much exploded. That’s the only way I can describe it- one moment my nose was on my face and the next, it was in my cupped hands. My nose wasn’t the only thing that went tumbling out of my head that day- a good section of my cheekbones, sinuses, and lower cranium managed to escape during that fateful sneeze. It was horrendously painful- it was a primal, fiery kind of pain that escalated into an almost hot brilliance. I could actually feel my eyes prickling because it was that bad, and I was so blinded by the sheer intensity and where it was that I hadn’t noticed how everyone else was reacting. 

I think someone screamed. I think someone swore. I wasn’t really paying attention because my brain was still trying to process the fact that I was now holding half of my face amidst all the agony I was in. In fact, I don’t remember much of what happened after, besides being told to exit right now and head straight to detention young lady or else. I think I might have dissociated, but I don’t really know. I don’t even know why my face decided to explode like that either- Maybe when I fell over and knocked myself out I managed to fracture the roof of my mouth, or maybe I was just having a bad body day. Either way, I ended up with a missing face, a detention, and lots of pain.

I think it was a dick move of Mr Dyssof to give me a detention like that- It’s not like I wanted my face to explode on purpose! I mean, I know I’m impulsive, reckless and somewhat self-destructive, but I wouldn’t do something like that! I actually like being in classes and learning new things! It’s great!

So yeah, that’s why I had detention this morning. I really think you should do something about Mr Dyssof though- he didn’t even let me go to the nurses office to get some painkillers, or some help bandaging my face back together. He still has a huge grudge against me, even though I’ve explained to him on multiple occasions that I have a DNA disorder and that stuff like this is going to happen on a regular basis. I mean, if he’d have just let me go to the nurse’s office and then made me clean up any bloodstains I would be a much happier student, but he still insisted on punishing me for something that I can’t really help.

But yeah, that’s what happened. Can I head back to class now?