Ulcerate

ulcerate
verb, intransitive. To develop into or become affected by an ulcer (an open sore).

Frank either worked full-bore or he didn’t work at all. He had never been a middle-ground kind of guy. On this particular day, he didn’t realize that the blister that had formed beneath his work glove had ulcerated until he felt an unaccustomed warmth inside it, pulled it off, and saw the blood.

“Not good,” he said.

Dale could see it from his station a few yards down the line. “Take a break, Frank. Don’t bleed on product.”

Indecisive, Frank shook his head. It was important to keep the line moving--they had been told so. The workers were spread thin as it was. He didn’t want to drop out for first aid and make the others take up his slack. The sore wasn’t that bad. It looked worse than it felt--a stinging, that was all.

He started to put the glove back on, then felt hands at both elbows. Dale and John--from the station opposite Dale’s--were at his flanks, pulling him back from the line.

“You gotta go take care of that, Frank,” John told him.

“But the line...”

“We’ll fill in. Go, before you get all of us in trouble.” John bobbed his head toward the glassed-in observation platform, high on the wall. No one was visible at the window. Not yet.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.