This week’s Dr. Pimple Popper on TLC, airing Wednesay night will see several interesting cases, including a woman with one side of her body completely disfigured by strange huge squishy lumps and a young man named Anthony who comes to Dr. Lee’s office with a huge cyst in between both eyes, just to the side of the bridge of his nose.
Looking nervous as he enters her posh offices, he says: “Having needles that close to my eyes is a little nervewracking.”
The cyst between Anthony’s eyes is so large that it is impeding his vision and causing him to anguish in how he looks to others.
The location is so tricky that he has to see someone surgically competent as a mishandling of this cyst can cause an infection so bad that it can kill him or even blind him. This is why Dr. Lee cautions people to not perform these sorts of surgeries at home using crude objects to poke holes in the skin. You can really scar or damage someone permanently.
When Dr. Lee explains this in our clip, she shows us the area she calls ‘the triangle of death” making a triangle with her fingers around her nose and under the eye area.
Anthony tells her it has been growing “for two years.”
“I think this is a cyst, but there’s something firm in there…it’s not uncommon to see cysts like this,” Dr. Lee says. She explains further and adds: “They tend to occur more in people with a little bit of acne, they come and go, this one persists… and now that there’s a sac under the skin that’s still shedding, and it’s not being released it’s just growing bigger and bigger.”
What Anthony has may be called a trichilemmal cyst or a pilar cyst, according to DermNetz, a medical reference site for dermatologists. The white paper says that “90% of trichilemmal cysts occur on scalp… otherwise face, neck, trunk, and extremities.” Middle-age is when they occur most and presents as a round or oval firm nodule as what Anthony is showing with no clear center or “punctum.”
But it is the location of it that worries her.
“This is called the triangle of death,” she says. “This is an area that if you have something that is infected on your skin, there is a higher chance of this infection causing blindness or possibly death.”
Anthony is prepped for an exploratory poke. She drapes his face and injects a numbing solution to get the area ready for an incision.
She reassures him as he lays on the surgery table: “Just keep your eyes closed…and one little pinch.”
In another shot she explains that this is a very serious surgery. She says: “I take very seriously when I do surgery on the face, in particular. I need to call upon all my training because a moment of imprecision and I can really mess up this guy’s face.”
Watch tonight as Dr. Lee also helps a woman with one side of her body being malformed by mysterious swelling and large lumps that completely mystify her.
Also, check in to see how Anthony fares post-surgery and if she is able to safely remove his cyst.
Last week we saw Dr. Pimple Popper tackle the world’s largest cyst!
Dr. Pimple Popper airs Wednesday nights at 10/9c on TLC.