Neck to Neck

Regular readers will know that in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, Dr Sandra Lee occupies a spot somewhere between Oprah and Gal Gadot. In other words, you haven’t seen this kind of blind devotion since Saffy first laid eyes on a shirtless Chris Pratt in ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’.

Every morning, we diligently tap Dr Lee’s YouTube channel to see what amazing new dermatological problem she’s solving that day. Sometimes, it’s epidermoid cysts that look like chocolate sauce, and others like dried up hard boiled egg. Or, it might be a wobbly lipoma popping out of a shoulder. And on good days, you have a giant infected cyst on a belly that gushes like a waterfall when cut open.

People think our obsession is weird. The other day, Sharyn announced that it really disturbed her she was friends with people who watch the excisions of  pilar cysts while eating economy mee for breakfast.

Saffy looked up from her phone in surprise. “Why? What’s wrong?”

Sharyn stared hard at the image on Saffy’s screen – Dr Lee was busy snipping away at a bulge on some poor woman’s head. “How to eat liddat? Aiyoh!” she sighed. “I got no appetite now!”

Saffy put down her fork, hit pause on her phone and adjusted her bra strap to give her bosom extra room in which to expand. “Excuse me, but aren’t you the one who sits on the loo and watches in-grown hairs being pulled out?”

If Sharyn, famously known in school by her nickname ‘Iron Board’ Wong, could have inflated her bosom with any significant effect, she would have. As it was, she contented herself with an undignified yelp.

“Ay, you dohn anyhow say ting liddat in public, can? Wait, my boss hear, then how?”

Saffy pursed her lips stubbornly. “Well, don’t you?”

Sharyn waved her hands. “Aiyah, where got same? Burst a pimple not the same as pull out a hair!”

“Excuse me.” Saffy’s voice was frosty. “I’ve watched the Instagram videos of that woman you follow…what’s her face… Tweezist or something? That is some serious sickness she’s got going on there! First of all, who has that many ingrown hairs on their body? And secondly, have you seen the gunk that comes out when she pulls the hair? Oh my God, just talking about it makes me want to heave!”

“I don’t think it’s all her hair, lah! Ay, you want ice-kachang?” Sharyn said, demonstrating, not for the first time, her complete inability to fully escalate an argument.

            Later that day, just as Saffy had finished giving me a particularly graphic, stomach churning re-enactment of how Tweezist inserts a needle under her skin to loosen the trapped hair, my phone pinged. It was a message from my friend Don that said: “I suggest you stop watching the zit-popping videos….You should watch neck cracking. More shiok. Make better use of your speakers.”

            “Neck cracking?” Saffy asked. “Is that a thing?”

            “Who knows? It takes a lot to surprise me these days,” I replied as we both went onto YouTube. Within seconds, I was shoving a clenched fist into my mouth to stop from yelling.

            From her supine position on the couch, Saffy’s eyes widened as she stared at her phone. “Oh. My. God. This is amazing! Errrk!” she sucked in her breath as a neck was twisted. “Hey, some of these doctors are quite hot! Wait, are they doctors or chiropractors or physiotherapists? How come they’re all Indians? Oh, he’s cute!”

            Meanwhile, I replied to Don: “Just watched one. Gawd, that’s too scary! Nothing shiok about that!”

            “That’s because it’s not my neck.”

            “Ask him if there’s a Dr Sandra Lee equivalent for neck crackers!” Saffy called out. By this stage, she’d plugged her earphones into her iPhone. “Oh, wow, he’s right! The cracking sounds even better in stereo!”

            Later that night, Amanda said she was not watching any neck cracking videos.

            “But they’re so good!” Saffy told her.

            “That’s why I’m not watching any! You know I have an addictive personality. I can barely keep up with Dr Pimple Popper and Tweezist, so how…”

            Saffy moaned. “No! Don’t tell me you watch those awful videos, too!”

            “Oh, they’re good!” Amanda sighed. “Her captions are hysterical. I think she’s Korean. You have to really admire her technique, she’s so precise!”

            “But the slimy bits at the end of the hair follicle are just so gross!”

            “That’s the best part!”

            Sharyn says it amazes her that between the four of us, we actually have seven university degrees.