Duct Tape Removes Warts

Y'all, don't think bad about me, but I used to have a wart. It's gone now, but it was totally gross. Just ask Matt--I was all the time showing it to him and saying things like, "This is so gross, look at it!"

It was a plantar's wart, I think, and smack on the bottom of my foot, which tells me that I need to start wearing sandals when I go to the public swimming pool, and it was crazy-painful to walk on, so much so that I was actually popping ibuprofin every morning just to take the edge off.

I tried that over-the-counter wart removal stuff, which just peeled away a bunch of skin which then callused and became even more painful to walk on, and I tried the doctor's office, where a physician's assistant froze it but told me that freezing didn't always work and told me to use duct tape.

And so let me tell you--duct tape is the business. You put the duct tape on to cover your wart, and then every now and then you rip it off and put on a new piece. You can leave the tape off for a while every now and then to let your skin rest, and the whole process does take a while. But it absolutely works.

Nothing happened for a couple of days after I started putting the duct tape over the wart on my foot, but then, on like day three, all these other tiny little warts suddenly started erupting all around the original wart--my theory is that this was other places where the virus was embedded in my skin, and the duct tape was just bringing them all to the surface at once, instead of one-by-one over time for the rest of my freakin' life.

Some people say that the wart will turn black and then fall off with the duct tape, but this isn't what happened with me. All the little warts, and the larger plantar's wart, turned to dead, callused skin, and then, every time I peeled off the duct tape, I would also take off some of this skin. Sometimes the tape would peel off a huge, thick chunk of skin, basically showing how deeply the wart had been embedded--seriously, it was crazy-deep, you should ask Matt--and then leave this huge crater in the bottom of my foot. It was disgusting. And also awesome.

The duct tape didn't hurt, although I've actually been trying this process on Willow, now, for a plantar's wart that she also has on the bottom of her foot, and she doesn't like it when the tape peels off part of the wart, although I think that it may just be the unpleasant sensation of peeling skin that she's reacting to, not actually pain. And it's working on her just the same, although I'm taking my time with the process and letting her foot have plenty of time away from the duct tape, as well.

And when we've used up all our duct tape on all our weird and disgusting skin ailments? I kind of want to make us some commemmorative duct tape roll bangles.

Walking on warts makes feet sore, so we both liked warm footbaths with tons of apple cider vinegar and a generous amount of tea tree oil and epsom salts, as well. But what doesn't a nice, warm footbath cure?

In other news, the girls and I have been spending an oddly large amount of time at cemeteries lately:

I've gotten really into photographing old headstones, because I'm weird and weird people have weird hobbies, apparently. I love looking at the entire landscape of an older cemetery, however--I mean, doesn't that photo above remind you of a sort of post-modern Stonehenge, with the huge chunks of limestone all skewed and plunked down into the green grass?

Once after visiting Stonehenge, I planned this elaborate hiking trip to visit all the mysterious standing stones all around the countryside in Great Britain. And then I grew up and got less weird, but I think I'm cycling back around to more weird again, so perhaps that trip will make it back on my to-do list someday soon.