Scratching The Itch
Posted by Ross Rosenberg
The New Yorker has a fascinating article up about the itch, what it is and attempts by medicine to understand how it works. Throughout the article is the story of a woman named M. who, after a long series of misfortunes, develops an itch that she cannot rid herself of. An itch that proves costly:
“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
I find it maddening enough to have a mosquito bite that refuses to be tamed by the dull ends of my fingers; an itch of such epic proportions that it compels me to erode a hole in my skull is well beyond my ken.
The Itch [The New Yorker] : Thanks, Wytu!
Categories: Brains, Itchy, Medicine
Posted at 1:30 pm on June 25, 2008
10 Comments -
I call BS.
1) The scalp bleeds like nothing else. She would wake up on a pillow covered in blood.
2) You want pain? Try bone pain. Yeah, have fun with that.
3) In a contest between skull and fingernails, she’s more likely to wear her fingernails down to nubs than make it through the bone.
4) You want bleeding? Forget the scalp, try that big sack of blood vessels that surrounds the brain.
5) Since when is brain matter, or anything else in your skull other than the mucus, green? Brain matter appears off-whitish, even when its leaking through holes in your skull (I’ve seen documented precedents). Maybe, MAYBE, she managed to scratch her way into her sinus cavities, which actually extend quite a ways up the skull. Or maybe the wound in her scalp got infected. But she did not bore a hole all the way to her brain.
This has got to be urban legend.
Comment by Joe Shadows — June 25, 2008 @ 1:39 pm
sounds just plausible enough. Which is what the best horror is made of.
I’m also interested I’m just how many people will ken what ken means and its origin. Nice. Nice.
Comment by jimmyhazard — June 25, 2008 @ 1:44 pm
interested IN… Not I’m… Damn iPhone and me not spell checking before submitting.
Comment by jimmyhazard — June 25, 2008 @ 1:46 pm
I’m with you, Joe.
Comment by Susannah — June 25, 2008 @ 2:43 pm
Joe and Susannah – It is not implied that all the work of eroding away the bone was done in one night, just that she finally made it through on this particular night. It is also mentioned that the skin near the wound was found to be numb to heat, cold, and pain. The article mostly deals with our brains and how they perceive stimuli:
“The new theory may also explain what was going on with M.’s itch. The shingles destroyed most of the nerves in her scalp. And, for whatever reason, her brain surmised from what little input it had that something horribly itchy was going on—that perhaps a whole army of ants were crawling back and forth over just that patch of skin. There wasn’t any such thing, of course. But M.’s brain has received no contrary signals that would shift its assumptions. So she itches.”
I’m not saying that it’s not extraordinary but I do think it is entirely plausible, though I am, of course, not an expert in these matters.
Comment by Ross Rosenberg — June 25, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
Luckily, for the first time in history, we actually live in a time when you can stop most itches. When I was a kid, you just had to suffer. Today, there’s Itch-Ex. It works.
Comment by Mogothe Mugger — June 25, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
All I know is that its highly unlikely that a normal (i.e., not related to Lady Deathstrike) human being could, over time, scratch a hole into their brain cavity using their fingernails (which, again, even over time, would be worn down to nubs in the face of bone) and cause inexplicably green brain matter to leak out. Especially since in order to leak out, it would have to be either melting from high fever, or under pressure due to internal swelling, and either way she’d likely be unconscious, if not dead. Again, the wound probably just got badly infected (with staph or similar) and pustulent, which is a perfectly good reason to send someone to the hospital, especially if they have HIV. Its even possible that between the infection, the external damage, and the HIV, the virus managed to make it to her brain, or trigger a heavy fever, causing the apparent brain damage.
M was probably just misunderstanding or misremembering the incident, which is understandable given the stress she was probably under at the time. Unless I see a medical chart with notes saying “perforation of the skull”, or perhaps a particularly impressive episode of Mythbusters, I’m not buying it.
Comment by Joe Shadows — June 25, 2008 @ 8:17 pm
I don’t buy it either. Skulls are thick, fingernails are weak compared to bone. This reeks of urban legend.
Comment by Julie K — June 26, 2008 @ 7:54 am
I know this is difficult to believe, but it is in fact true. A top journal, Science, covered this story. Pics and CT scans are shown. She had OCD tendencies and scratched at night for years. This took a long time to actually get to the brain. She knew it was getting bad, but people with OCD have just accept that they are a “picker” or “scratcher” and that they get sores.
Comment by Anne — November 2, 2008 @ 9:35 pm
ain’t it neet!
Comment by j. caboser — April 29, 2009 @ 2:40 pm