Ganglion What?

One day when I was a junior in college I noticed a big bump on the back of my hand.

I immediately suspected cancer, or an alien fetus. But after scouring the internet like a good hypochondriac, I discovered that it was probably just a ganglion cyst. No biggie.

It's totally normal and benign, just kinda lumpy and annoying to look at. People used to call them Bible bumps because one method of getting rid of a ganglion cyst is to hit it really hard with something big and heavy and pretty much everybody back in the day had a bible, which is apparently an effective thing to hit people with. I did not attempt this method, though my dad did offer to smack me with a large book.

It went away on its own after a couple months.

And now, 2 years and a couple hundred miles later, it's back. I noticed it yesterday, when I was admiring my left hand as I sometimes do. It's just as uselessly lumpy as ever and I can't seem to stop looking at it.

I like to think that it went away on a vacation and now it's back on my hand, thinking to itself, “Okay, back to work, being useless and lumpy.”

Good work, ganglion cyst. Good work.