Scratching The Itch

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 At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab.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!