Vice Blog Post: Life Of Pain

Hello. My name is James Knight. When I am not sticking things in my ass or drinking my insides rotten in a professional capacity, I am pretty adept at getting myself hurt, injured, and generally pained in my own time. Those with good memories may remember that time I snapped my ankle at a Fucked Up show. Or that other time when I fell off my bike and my face looked like one of those sex dolls that lonely guys grease up and fuck all night. Well, this last month has been a doozy for accidents, mishaps and minor bodily harm.

A few Fridays ago I was quietly watching that Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much with my girlfriend. You know, the one with the big allegorical cymbal smashing intro. So there I was, sitting comfortably, watching Jimmy Stewart get all worked up, when out of nowhere my girlfriend (who was kind of lying down on the sofa with her head in my lap) went to tenderly caress the side of my face. Except she missed. And put her thumb in my eye. Cue me rolling around on the floor in agony, whimpering about unimaginable pain while she nonchalantly put her hands on her hips and said, "All I did was put my thumb in your mouth."



Luckily I live right by Moorfields Eye Hospital. After a stagger through a sea of Friday night shambling drunks and hen night refugees, the good folks in A&E told me that I had a ruptured cornea. The intense and unyielding pain that I was feeling was because the cornea is made up solely of nerve endings, which had been torn asunder by the errant thumbnail. So far so pain. I was given some local anaesthetic to calm the spasms, patched up and given enough eyedrops to keep Sauron's iris moist.



Not willing to let a measly ruptured cornea get the better of my weekend, I attempted to go see Neil Young play in Hyde Park. I lasted about 20 minutes and then went home to cry. Or carry on crying, rather. Multiple trips to Moorfields later and it looks like the cornea has settled but the scar is just under a centimetre in length so I am all booked in for laser surgery to get it closed up next month. Oh happy days.



A few days after the eye incident, I went on a week-long holiday to France in search of sun, sea, sand and non-obtrusive eye-level objects. Sadly the sun was hiding for the first 48 hours. Day three dawned though and it was 36 degrees of globally warmed solar apocalypse outside. We headed to the beach where I fell asleep only to wake up with an intense itchy feeling all over my back. Turned out I'd been snoozing a while too long and my virgin, white, office-tanned back had been burnt beetroot red. By night I was convulsing from nausea and had a temperature up in the hundreds. Oh, and I had blisters all over my back that would swell, pop, weep puss and leave raw patches so tender it felt like electric shocks if they came into contact with anything.



The fun really started a few days later when I got home and huge swathes of my back started falling off. If you are really into picking scabs or gross dermatological conditions, feel free to come have a pick. If I'm not in, you will find plenty of me on my chair.