Somedays, I Feel A Real Kinship With Homer Simpson

Today I was working on the computer when I happened to look down and notice something on my thumb.

I freaked.

There on my thumbnail was a thick, bumpy, white-ish, yellow-ish, gnarled-looking growth. It was disgusting and surely fungal or viral and undoubtedly aggressive as I didn't think it had been there the day before.

I was afraid to touch it and somehow spread what was happening, so gingerly covered the gross appendage with a Kleenex and went to everyone's favourite alarmist website, Web MD:

Ugh. Fungi. Viruses. Warts. Cysts. The barfy possibilities were endless.

I unwrapped my thumb to get a closer look. It had all the symptoms of all of the things Web MD had listed. Oh, how humiliating. I kept thinking about the meeting I have to go to tomorrow and whether I could get away with wrapping the thumbnail in a band-aid and tell some elaborate story about how I nearly cut my thumb off cooking dinner. There was no way I was going to parade its sickly hideousness out in public.

I wondered if the nail bed underneath it had already died or if there was a chance of saving it. Carefully, I took a pair of tweezers and ever-so-cautiously picked at the gnarled bark covering my nail. It lifted easily and exposed a perfectly healthy, normal patch of thumbnail. And then the part that I lifted flaked off.

I yelped. And then I bravely inspected it closer.

And that's when I realized it.

It was melted cheese.