I scraped the back of my hand (next to the thumb) on some coral during one scuba dive. A week later, it looked funky and hadn't healed. Another week, still not healing. The doctor did a small incision and looked at it under a microscope. I had coral growing inside my skin! The doc couldn't find any reference on what to kill the coral with, so he just cut that section of skin out.
Be fucked if I know what the coral was EATING. Maybe it's best I don't know.
Now you have me thinking about it, Rope. Dear gods, please tell me you went back for follow-ups.
Yep, 2 weeks later at the follow-up appointment the skin had started to heal up, with no obvious trace of the coral that'd been living there. Here 12 or 13 years later, it's just a faint scar due to all of the tissue he had to remove to make sure he got it all.
Opinion is split on whether the coral was actually growing, or I merely had chunks of it stuck in the wound causing irritation. Some MDs say no, it can't grow, others say they've seen similar events. Even without a bacterial infection (mine was all localized), coral scrapes can take weeks or months to heal without surgical intervention. My response: please cut it the hell out of me!