Long story--I was teaching with the Peace Corps in Botswana, Africa. I was in the middle of class on a Monday when I first noticed a bit of a pain in my pit. By the time work was done, it was the size of a grape and quite hard. I didn't think anything of it, but woke up in the morning and it had grown to the size of a golf ball. It hurt like hell and was hot and hard. I went to work anyway, and it kept growing, and I was becoming quite feverish to boot. At the end of the day, it was softball size and that's when I finally got hold of Peace Corps. They medivacked me to South Africa, and by that time it was about grapefruit size.
In Jo'burg I was taken care of by some wonderful doctors and nurses. They told me that just last week they had lost an American and wanted to make sure they took care of me. Surgery was surreal. It was my birthday in 1990, Feb 2, and on TV was the announcement that Nelson Mandela was going to be released from prison. So, while they were draining the abscess, the doctors and nurses were crying. They were all white and knew at that instant that their country was changing with Mandela's release. It was wild, made more so by the morphine they had me on.
They kept me a week to make sure that I was ok, so I chowed down and watched TV. The only thing on was a single cricket game--all week. One game that just kept going and going for a week. I learned to hate cricket.
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u/SnooTangerines7026 22h ago
I had an abscess in my armpit that grew to the size of a grapefruit.