A fall just over a fortnight ago that resulted in a scraped knee and a subsequent scab, had almost healed as of yesterday, until the person whose knee it was on, picked the scab off it.
Myke Woodson, of Oaf-on-Sea, East Yorkshire, tripped and fell down on the back doorstep at his mother's house, hurting his foot, right knee, and left hand, which he put out to break his fall.
The hand and the foot were forgotten in five minutes, but the blood at the knee clotted, and formed an unsightly scab which, as has been mentioned, hung around for more than two weeks.
Woodson had been itching to remove the scab for days, and gently going around its edges, lifting it slightly with his thumb and fingernails, gave him a curious kind of pleasure.
He was careful to avoid ripping it off, knowing that, by doing so, it would bleed and form a new scab, and might also be painful.
Patiently, he sat watching TV, night after night, gently coaxing and easing the protective crust away from the skin around it, halting when he felt he'd done enough at different points.
Eventually, with the scab hanging on to the knee by the faintest of threads, he gave a slight tug, and the unsightly blackish/reddish tissue came away.
Making sure his mother wasn't looking, he flicked the scab away onto the carpet.
Then the knee started bleeding again.
