You know it’s going to be bad when Dr. Pimple Popper busts out the face mask, but somehow this removal was worse than you could imagine.
You have to (I mean must) watch this clip from Thursday’s Dr. Pimple Popper in its entirety. It’s got it all. A marathon lipoma removal (she removed a not-so-sweet 16 in total)! A 46-year-old dad (and father, hee hee) from Brooklyn named Gerard. Multiple food analogies. Hyper coagulating blood. A “nice little goodbye gesture” in the form of giving tech Christy the opportunity to pop one of Gerard’s lipoma before her maternity leave. Everything!
Hard to imagine anything topping this (anything that ever airs on television again, really), but the episode contained a few other highlights. One came in the form of a disagreement between 58-year-old, lesion-besotted patient Gina and Dr. PP. Gina’s lesions, it seems, were self-inflicted as the result of picking at what she perceives as small bumps and blood clots just under her skin. The entire thing reminded me of Morgellons cases, down to Gina’s insistence that her condition is not psychosomatic.
“I disagree!” she said of Dr. PP’s assessment, to dramatic music. I have never heard anyone speak to the doctor in this way! Dr. Pimple Popper attempted to manage Gina’s “vicious cycle” of the repeated rubbing and scratching of her sores (which only makes her want to do it more), by giving her pads to cover them while they healed, but in the update, Gina revealed that she was still struggling. It was really sad. If perception is a controlled hallucination, Gina’s condition is as real as any, but beyond the aid of a dermatologist. A case as fascinating as it was harrowing.
And then there was 34-year-old Eric who developed a pilar cyst via hitting his head a few years ago. His daughter pretended it was an on/off button and would hit it to power him down/up.
I found this moving? I teared up? It was so sweet that Eric and his daughter found a way to make his skin condition something fun? Just, like, total daughter-father acceptance? So sweet. He got the cyst removed, which allowed him to do more things with her, anyway, like ice-skating (which the bump made him too paranoid to try, lest he re-traumatize the area). He lost a power switch but gained the ability for even more bonding time with his daughter. So win/win.
Since I was out of town last week, I missed a bunch of food metaphors from the previous episode, which I have gone back and collected. They include a rhinophyma’s smell being compared to fish oil and its appearance being compared to grapes.
And then this week, in the aforementioned marathon removal, Gerard compared one of his lipomas to gnocchi (gag) and Dr. Pimple Popper said one looked like a piece of General Tso’s chicken, “it just needs the breading and to be fried a little more.” How very dare this woman! This should be illegal!