I've been very grateful in my 23 years of life to not have any major health issues, or have to have surgeries (knock on wood). But of course, like every human life form, I have flaws with my body.

I have a branchial cleft cyst, which is a birth abnormality that often drains fluid (pus). It occurs in the embryonic stage where a branchial cleft didn't go away like it should've. It can be located on different parts of the body, usually on the neck, and mine is located on my upper chest. It's not dangerous or critical (unless there's a serious infection, or cancer, but that's extremely rare), just very annoying to have. It gets itchy and I have to apply pressure to it to drain it to get it to stop itching.

I've had my cyst since I can remember. My mom would constantly push and pick at it and pus would come out of it. It never gave me any trouble, never caused me to get sick, and I have always accepted it as part of my body.

It wasn't until my junior year of college where my cyst started giving me problems. My cyst kept itching, nothing unusual about that, but when I went to push on it to drain it, nothing drained. I kept digging and touching it that I ended up breaking the skin around it, causing the skin to bleed.

I went to the health center to see if there was something that could be done to stop the itching. The young nurse had never seen my cyst before, and her confused look was so telling. She had an older nurse look at it. The older nurse asked if I have ever had a problem with this before and I said no. Asked if I had a doctor look at it, I said no. The nurse said she had seen this before and called it a cyst. That was the first time I heard that word to describe my weird abnormality. Cyst.

The nurse told me to apply hot water compresses to the cyst to help it drain and to put ointment on my wound to heal it. The hot water eventually caused the cyst to drain it and the wound healed as well. But finally, I had a name for my abnormality.

*My branchial cleft cyst, located below my neck. This is what it looks like when it's not infected/irritated.

I ended up doing my own research and after many frustrating Google searches, I found a name for my thing: branchial cleft cyst. Medicinenet.com defines a branchial cleft cyst as, "a cavity that is a remnant from embryologic development and is still present at birth in one side of the neck, just in front of the large angulated muscle on either side (the sternocleidomastoid muscle). The cyst may not be recognized until adolescence when it enlarges its oval shape. Sometimes a branchial cleft cyst develops a sinus or drainage pathway to the surface of the skin, from which mucus can be expressed."

Making this discovery made me feel better about my cyst, now knowing it had an actual medical term, as well as knowing many other people have it as well. Surgery can be used to remove the cyst, which for now I'm declining, as I don't think surgery is needed at this time; if something's not broken, don't fix it. As cheesy as it sounds, my cyst is part of my body, and it's part of what makes me unique.

One way that's been used to describe a branchial cleft cyst is how it's similar in the embryonic state when a fish develops gills. I'm obsessed with mermaids and underwater life, so naturally, this made me happy. Medically, it's a cyst, to me, it's a gill left over from the womb:)