Red Alert!

I wouldn't ordinarily wake people up just before 4:30 a.m. to make an announcement (I know I'm not actually waking anyone up by posting a blog, and that you don't all have alarms set to sound as loudly as sirens at any time a new post appears on my blog so that you  can all run to your computers or grab your phones to catch every word as soon as i hit the "Publish" button, but please humor me in this moment, as my present level of distress is so intense that I deserve to be humored right now), but this one is big. REALLY big.

I have an acne blemish on my forehead. An honest-to-God pimple has dared to invade my heretofore unviolated skin.  It's the real deal -- a zit measuring nearly one millimeter in diameter.

i woke my dad up to demand an Accutane prescription. He said no. (I won't share his precise wording because I've thus far managed to maintain a more-or-less PG13/TV14 rating on this blog, but suffice it to say he denied my request.) When I refused to be so easily dismissed, he got his lazy butt out of bed to find a prescription pad and to scrawl out a prescription for a weaker retinoid, which he insisted was still the dermatological equivalent to treating a hangnail with chemotherapy, but he knew that sleep for him tonight  would have  been a lost cause if he had not written me a script for something. 

Retinoids used for treatment of acne reduce inflammation and inhibit pore-clogging. In the event that anyone feels the need to log onto WebMD or Wikipedia for the purpose of  acquiring and sharing the knowledge that retinoids are Vitamin A-based, are used for multiple skin conditions including but not limited to wrinkles, age spots, and types of skin cancer, and have been known to be associated with birth defects when used by pregnant women, please keep in mind that I've completed two years of medical school and could have authored the Wikipedia article myself if I had felt thus motivated.

I drove to a twenty-four hour pharmacy and had the prescription filled, and have applied it to the nasty excrescence, which is not a whitehead but, left to its own devices, could easily have turned into one before dawn. I also ordered express delivery of basically every product that the Proactiv company markets. I'm declaring nuclear war on acne. If I had an important event tomorrow, emergency remedies exist to wipe out a single zit in less than twenty-four hours, but since I don't have to leave the house, I won't demand such extreme measures just yet.

I am accepting any and all expressions of sympathy.