Popular as they are,??? ?? ?? a pimple popping platform is probably the last place you'd expect to find a support network. But a shared love of the strange hobby brought a community of people together to support a fellow popper through her months-long wound recovery.
SEE ALSO: Navel stones to ingrown toenails: Can you handle YouTube's grossest videos?r/popping, a subreddit for "pictures and videos about cysts and pimples," has 144,000 faithful zit popping enthusiasts. And it's where one Redditor — who asked to be referred to by her username, Slamhood, for this piece — found the community she needed while recovering from a horrible bone infection.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Slamhood underwent bunion removal surgery in December 2016, when she was 22 years old. Bunion surgery, while painful, is typically a low-stakes procedure. Recovery usually takes six to eight weeks in a healthy adult. But problems arose when Slamhood went back to work as a waitress. Despite only doing short shifts to limit the time spent on her feet, her foot wasn't healing properly.
"If I could go back in time I probably wouldn't do it," she said during a phone interview. Her foot "just took a complete nosedive."
About 10 months after the first surgery, her doctors found a bone cyst where they'd removed the bunion. (The exact causes of bone cysts are unknown.) Her doctors took a sample of bone to test for arthritis, packing the hole with bone wax to prevent spurs. Although they removed the bone wax when they returned the sample to her wound, Slamhood developed a severe allergic reaction. Her foot became a swollen mess.
"My foot just wouldn't close, it was leaking pus everywhere," she said. That's exactly the kind of content r/popping subscribers like to see.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable In her first post about her foot on r/popping seven months ago, Slamhood wrote that her foot wound "shot out pus like an erupting volcano." Most of r/popping's posts are shaky videos of people extracting their boyfriends' ingrown back hairs, or photos of whatever monstrosity an ear, nose, and throat doctor dug out of someone's ear canals — few people actually post about major wounds.
Slamhood lovespopping videos: "I don't know, I'm weird like that. I'm grossed out, but I'm also like, man, I wish I could be in that room." She said she's always wanted to be a "fly on the wall," watching cysts burst in person. Although she was in excruciating pain, she figured others might find some satisfaction in her glorious pus-filled foot.
"It had just poppedinto my head," she said. "And I was like, I should post this to show people what I’m experiencing, and to give them a somewhat good oozing puss picture of my foot."
Slamhood's first post brought an influx of support for her healing process, including this sweet comment from a subscriber, about a month later:
"Everyone started talking to me and saying, 'I wanna see your foot heal,'" Slamhood said.
She began posting regular updates, documenting when her foot "started spurting puss up to four feet away" to when her incision split, and "this weird spongy-fatty-looking thing" kept popping out. (Warning: The video is nauseating. Click at your own risk.)
Slamhood's foot was not getting better. Even though she went through another procedure to "powerwash out" the rest of the bone wax, the wound still wouldn't close up. Her original doctor gave up, unable to do more, so Slamhood found another doctor near her home in Michigan. That one told her the infection was so bad she could lose her foot.
"I was like, well, that'll suck, but if my brother could do it, then I could do it too," she said. Her brother became an amputee after he lost his foot in a motorcycle accident. In a comment in r/popping, she joked that they could even share prosthetics.
Amid surgery after surgery and her difficult recovery process, Slamhood broke up with her fiancé and called off her wedding. She called it "the worst thing" she's had to do in her life. "It just wasn't gonna work out," Slamhood said. "I literally lost everything."
In an update to her foot saga, she told her fellow r/popping subscribers what she was going through. Many had started messaging her every day to check in, and some even sent get-well cards. r/popping subscribers even visited her in the hospital while she recovered from surgeries.
Like a best friend offering a bottle of wine after a breakup, Redditors started pouring out their emotional support. Only, those heart-to-hearts took place under a photo of a deeply infected foot instead of at a coffee shop or bar or living room.
"I started doing the our father and Hail Mary again," u/jennepig commented. "Not sarcastically, but therapeutically, to get in the habit of praying for you."
Another told Slamhood that she was a "herculean inspiration of grit and determination." When she updated r/popping on her recovery after a nearly a month of silence, one Redditor commented, "Holy shit! You're still alive! Yay!!! Stay strong. Your weird little community is pulling for you!"
"I get happy little messages, and I was getting little care packages," Slamhood said. She got choked up on our call, telling me, "My heart is just so full from that community."
The subreddit even banded together to create a GoFundMe to offset some of her medical costs, raising just over $1,600. Gillian Long, who goes by Nemophilist on Reddit, created the fundraiser. She said Slamhood was "too modest" to ask for money.
"She had posted at least once a month for a while on the popping subreddit, and I noticed that she wasn't really getting any better," Long said over a video call. "And the whole community of Reddit popping was getting invested in her story, so I saw an opportunity."
Slamhood gets emotional at the idea of random strangers on the internet donating to her campaign. She said it took "some time getting used to the idea of people helping," but she was "blessed" that Long started the fundraiser in the first place.
By her fifth surgery, three months ago, Slamhood had to get a wound vac to pump saline through the infection. Just a few days before, she'd had a positive update for r/popping — the antibiotic beads her surgeon tucked into her foot seemed to be working, and even though the pain was unbearable, her wound appeared to be healing. Then the wound exploded with pus and blood after an undetected bone infection burst open and leaked through her foot. Which led to her fifth surgery.
People offered their encouragement in the comments. One Redditor told her that a wound vac was a good sign, since it saved their leg after a crash. They reposted links to her GoFundMe and a moderator from r/healthinsurance offered to help "sort things out" if she needed help with bills. (Slamhood ended up not taking them up on the offer, since she was on her parents' insurance. "There are other people out there that need more help than I do regarding insurance," she said.)
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable "It makes me feel on top of the world just knowing there's people out there that care about me," Slamhood said. "Everybody wants to see me back on my feet."
She even got her medical team involved, asking her surgeon to let her take photos for her Reddit community whenever there was an update.
Slamhood went in for a sixth surgery a few days after getting the wound vac, which brought on an excruciating recovery process that involved several rounds of antibiotics, extreme nerve damage from the infections, and weeks of using a walker so she wouldn't pull out her IV line.
Three weeks ago, Slamhood was able to wear shoes on both her feet for the first time in more than six months. "I still have to wear my boot all the time but oh my goodness would you look at that, an actual pair of SHOES," she said. "A pair that doesn’t rub against my incision for once. A pair that doesn’t make me cry when I put them on. A pair that actually makes me feel normal again!"
"The moment we've all been waiting for, folks," she posted triumphantly in r/popping.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable "I think it's a really magical thing that a community that loves zit popping came together for a girl that almost lost her foot," Long reflected after Slamhood's victory post.
A year and a half after her first bunion surgery, Slamhood isn't completely healed yet. She's still in nearly unbearable pain from nerve damage, and she's terrified the infection will come back. The simplest pressure on her foot, like her dog stepping on it, brings her to her knees because it hurts so much. She'll have to get another surgery to fuse her joints at some time in the future, and she can't start physical therapy until the delicate skin on her foot heals completely.
Throughout all of this, Slamhood's parents have been taking care of her medical bills. She doesn't know how many fees her surgeries and treatments have racked up, but she's endlessly grateful for the Redditors who contributed to her GoFundMe.
"I don’t ask my parents about it, because it just makes me sad," she said. "They’ve been my biggest rock and support me through it all."
Slamhood said she wants her last post for r/popping to be a photo of her standing in high heels. If she could wear a pair of heels for just five minutes, she'd be "on top of the world."
In the meantime, she's relentlessly positive and jokes about her recovery. "It's just incredible how people can come together for something like this," she said, sniffling through the phone. "I wanna show them that I beat this and that I made it through it with everybody's help."
"I'm doing much better now — I'm happy to stand on my own two feet," Slamhood laughed. "Well, actually my own one foot."
Featured Video For You
Turning landfill-bound makeup into sustainable watercolor paints