I have been inflicted with a number of diseases, plagues and other acts of god that make me the equivalent of a 21st century Job. Rodents, bed bugs, cholera, diseases of the skin, salmonella, west nile virus, and of course, warts. And that's just the beginning of the list.  Why am I so damn 1600's? I know the developing world is hip right now, but really - cholera?

This blog is for those of you who have that morbid curiosity.  You know who you are. You like the creepy crawly feeling you get when someone talking about infestations, bed bug bites, and the like. If you don't like that feeling, you might want to stop reading now.

Also, this blog is highly educational.  I have become schooled in the lingo of extermination; I know how bed bugs lull their victims with their two-pronged anesthesiatic bites; I have been successfully killing the warts on my feet with my own treatment in my bathroom, using Spanish fly juice bought from Canada.  All of these medieval plagues are tough to beat, and neither doctors nor exterminators have foolproof solutions.  You might find here, in your search to rid yourself of your Shakespearean health problems, an answer.  Welcome, lepers. Enjoy.

2nd of August 2009
 

Warts - a journey

To begin the blog, it is only appropriate to discuss my perilous and infinite journey with the dreaded plantar wart. In this section and others, I will chronicle how the warts came to be, and the various methods with which I fought them.  The good news is, the warts are currently in retreat (as of writing, July 2009) and for those of you suffering from warts, I hope you will find my various experiments with wart treatments a way to expdite your own wart war.

Part 1 - Birth of the Wart

If I had only known then what I know now. One fine evening having a glass of wine at a fellow lady’s house, L., I showed her the bumpy cauliflower looking thing on my heel that was annoying the shite out of me. I thought it was a callous. It was late summer. I had been wearing cheapass flipflops all over town. I figured the bumpy thing was a callous and it would go away in the winter. So I let the thing grow, touched it a lot, and little by little, it got bigger. That, my lovely friend L. said in her impeccable Horsham, England accent, is a plantar wart.

According to one medical website, plantar warts can be avoided. Medicine.net says, “To avoid plantar warts, a child should be taught never to wear someone else’s shoes. If a child gets plantar warts, they should be treated by a doctor. Plantar warts can be far more of a problem than common warts.” I practiced foot binding for about 5 years during my time in outer Mongolia, so my feet are stupid-tiny, I can’t really share shoes with anyone except nine-year-olds and ponies.  Sharing shoes was not the cause. Maybe I’ll never know what was. But either way, I was about to discover how much of a problem the wart could become.

But first, I decided to continue to ignore the thing. So went another year. So grew another 2 warts. By the next summer, I had one on my big toe and another on my heel. But the motherwart was really the one i wanted out. The one on my sole that throbbed sometimes at night after a long day. The gross one.

Check out this drawing of a foot seriously jacked up by warts. Luckily, even the motherwart didn’t look this narsty (but maybe I am just used to them…)

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