12:48am March 2, 2015

Cat bites and scratches, WTF?

So I have dermatillomania, which means I compulsively pick my skin, it’s a cousin to trichotillomania where people compulsively pull out their hair.  It’s incredibly hard to resist, so I have to find ways of making bandages that my fingers can’t get under.  (Which is so far being successful with a series of cat bites on my leg.)

CW: There’s discussion of blood under the cut.

So basically… I have a lot of cuts and scars and stuff on my body in various states of healing.

One of them is a muscle biopsy scar.  They went in pretty deep.  Luckily, I didn’t pick it, and it’s almost entirely healed.  Except there’s this one spot on the end that isn’t very deep at all anymore, but it’s slightly deeper than the cat bites.

So just for comparison’s sake:

I pick one end of an almost-healed muscle biopsy scar, deeper than the cat bites, but not so deep that I’m putting myself in much more danger than any other skin picking.  (And please don’t lecture me on the dangers, I know every single danger, I take every precaution I can, this is an impulse control disorder, if you can’t understand what that means, get the fuck away from me.)

So if I pick the end of the biopsy scar, it sometimes bleeds a little bit, not much.  The blood is bright red when it does show up.

If I pick any of the cat bites, no matter how shallow?  Dark red blood comes out in disturbingly large quantities.

Setting aside the fact that I shouldn’t be picking at all (yes, I know that, don’t bug me about it, nothing you can possibly say will help more than what I’m doing to train myself out of it at the moment). 

Why is a cat bite or scratch, no matter how shallow, so likely to bleed a lot and bleed dark red, whereas an equivalent scab that is not from a cat, will bleed much less and be bright red rather than dark – if it bleeds at all.

Oh by the way the medical professionals I’ve been dealing with on the infected cat scratches/bites have been wonderful.  As soon as they find out I’m a “picker”, as they call it, they either go “Oh wow I’m a picker too,” or they acknowledge this isn’t something I can just stop doing so we need to find other solutions in the meantime.

By the way, the big round infected scratch (from Fey jumping onto the bed, missing, and grabbing my leg with her claws for support)?  It’s getting better.  it doesn’t look like cheese pizza anymore.  It’s closed over.  It looks more like a cat butt.  Anne and I were (jokingly) talking about how if it left a cat-butt-looking scar, I could get a tattoo of the rest of a cat walking away, tail in the air, showing off her butt.

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