My story starts when I was about 13, I noticed some tiny black holes down the crease of my butt so of course at that age I freaked out but didn’t tell anyone and just dealt with it. I did do some research and found out what I had but it never really bothered me up until I was about 16 but it quickly went away, at 17 I decided to enlist in the military and I was looking up if my condition would cause problems and of course it said the condition is disqualifying, but I went anyway to see if I could sneak it past them. I went to the MEPs station for my full body physical and they totally didn’t see it, I thought it was a miracle, but of course if I knew what was going to happen I would have held off and got surgery before enlisting. So my second MEPs trip went smoothly and I was off to boot camp which was really easy a lot of walking and sweating and sitting on hard floors and everything that would probably cause this thing to flare up… Around 7 weeks in boot camp the cyst was forming and I could feel it and I thought I could tough it out for a couple more weeks but it was getting super unbearable. Even walking posed a challenge with this thing on my tailbone and my drill instructors quickly noticed. I ended up finally going to medical and got diagnosed for the first time with a pilonidal cyst and they set up an appointment to have it lanced the following day. That same night I had bed rest so i was allowed to lay in bed all day but when I got up to go eat dinner I felt a sudden dizziness, dramatic increased temperature and sweat pouring down my face, I was also very unstable wobbling out of bed and taking so long to put my boots and everything on and my drill instructors got concerned at this point. When we got back up to the barracks I quickly went to the bathroom because I felt a weird uncomfortable warmness on my butt, and sure enough the cyst had popped on its own…. I wiped away at it with toilet paper but it just kept coming like it was more than I ever could have imagined. I quickly told the drill instructors and they called an ambulance (they called an ambulance because medical was closed that day so that was the only way to get medical attention) so I got a nice ride tithe hospital where the doctors were pretty ruthless, cutting the thing open without any numbing agent and then sticking a shit ton of gauze inside and then they gave me a nice bottle of painkillers and told me to get out lmao I did ask them if I would be discharged for this and they said no but when I got back on base and went to medical for the surgery I was suppose to have they said they were going to have to discharge me and I was really devastated because the military is all I’ve ever wanted to do. But fast forward to getting home I immediately went to a doctor and he checked on it and he said there was a staff infection because the military didn’t do anything right with it, which pissed me off but whatever, he then said it had to get further surgery which kind of scared me, I didn’t wanna have to go through all that pain again, but I forgot that this wasn’t military doctors and they actually use anesthesia so I set up an appointment and went in for surgery. The surgery was called a wide excision and they left the would open to heal from the inside out and I’ve been reading that it has a very low chance of reocurrance which is what I’m hoping for, I have to wait 6 months to re enlist in the military which gives me a good amount of time to heal up and everything so it is what it is. But long story short this fucking pilonidal cyst bullshit will ruin your life.