Do-It-Yourself Skin-Tag Removal Can Be A Pain In The Ass

            For the last few years I’ve had skin tags on my butt. At first there was one and then another showed up, but it didn’t really bother me until one of them started getting very long. I guess it’s because my job is posing nude for art classes that having this protruding thing on my left cheek started to embarrass me. Last year I went to my doctor about it but he told me that removing a skin tag is cosmetic surgery so it’s not covered by OHIP and it would cost me about twenty dollars. I told him I couldn’t afford it so he informed me that I could do it myself by tying it off with some thread. He explained that the thread would cut off the circulation to the skin tag and so it would shrivel up and fall off. I tried it, but I couldn’t see what I was doing and don’t currently know anyone that would be willing to touch my buttocks for me, so my attempts failed. This fall though, as the time approached when I would be exposing my rump again at OCADU, I was dreading that students would be seeing that flap hanging from my behind, so I decided to try it again. I looked up “do-it-yourself skin tag removal” and found that rather than thread most people use dental floss. This time I made a knot first and after a few tries, managed to loop it around the tag. Once it was on and tightened, it wasn’t so difficult to tie another knot on top of the other. What followed was the most excruciating week of sitting that I’d ever experienced. Every time I sat down I winced in pain. Once I settled in though, after each descent, it was merely very uncomfortable. I consider myself lucky that I don’t have a wider bicycle seat because I think that it might have been unbearable to have it rubbing like that during my sometimes two hour rides. As the days went on though, nothing seemed to change. The tag felt healthy when I reached back there, so I was beginning to wonder if I’d done it wrong. I was starting to plan that the next time I had twenty dollars I would sacrifice it by getting Dr Shechtman to use his scalpel on the skin tag. I had two dreams about the tag coming off in my hand and both times it was about the size of a grape, smooth, almost transparent and the texture of cartilage. Around the sixth day it started to feel like the tag was drying up. Finally, it felt thin and withered, and on Friday afternoon when I was getting into bed for a siesta, I reached back to give the dental floss a tug and the skin tag came off in my hand. It was neither smooth, round nor transparent though. It actually looked a lot like a dried up mouse turd and it was about the size of an apple seed. I think that the pain I went through was much more than twenty dollars worth, so for a skin tag on the derriere, I would advise someone to go to the doctor and pay to have it removed rather than to tie it off and sit down in agony for a whole week. Unless of course you like that sort of thing.