Squeamish? Skip This Post: Just got back from the dermatologist, where my son had an item removed that we have taken to calling the Disgusting Bloody Ear Growth. It started out months and months ago as a fairly colorless lump behind his ear, and got bigger with time, and once it was big enough to feel weird to the touch, he couldn't stop touching it, and that made things worse. In August, his doctor said it didn't have to be removed if he could just stop picking at it, but ... yeah, that wasn't going to happen, was it? It just got bigger and bloodier and crustier and yuckier. He made at least one trip to the school nurse due to bleeding, his pillow was covered with splotches of blood, the bandaids we put over it came away with pads-full of disconcerting colors, and all in all, it started looking like the kind of thing that, if this was a horror movie, would be possessed by the devil. So there was nothing for it but to slice the dang thing off, and I was amazed at how quickly and fusslessly that was done. Our challenges, though, have not been excised: How the heck am I going to keep a skin-picking guy from doing damage to the eraser-size scab that's left behind? I see incessant nagging in my immediate future.