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	Twenty-Seven Warts by Ashley Sales By the time I was fourteen, I had twenty-four warts blanketing the bottom of my feet.  The first one sprouted during my swim-team years.  I was a Portage Packrat practicing rather slowly at the high school pool.  Every afternoon I would walk barefoot from the locker room across the beige tile deck, oblivious to the wart juice that sloshed around with the chlorinated water.  Within a few months, I had white spots covering my big toes.  They quickly erupted into Plantar’s warts, large white spots with a dark “seed” deep beneath the surface.  They felt like dead calluses, smooth around the rim but bumpy inside. They weren’t calluses, but the daddy of all warts.  Plantar’s warts are caused by HPV – the same virus that causes genital warts.  Luckily, though, having one doesn’t mean having the other.  Plantar’s are often mistaken for calluses and corns, although I’ve had both and am not sure how you could mistake a corn for a Plantar’s wart.  Unlike corns and calluses, these warts are alive.  The black “seeds” are actually tiny broken blood vessels, which means that when scraped, Plantar’s bleed.  They spread rapidly – through moist or sweaty skin, standing water, and just by being touched. I loved to pick at everything—scabs, boogers, ingrown toenails, pimples—and the warts were no exception.  Combined with my inability to thoroughly wash my hands, this meant I had warts cropping up all over my feet.  Fifteen on my left foot, nine on the right.  The largest was the size of a quarter, located on the fleshy, tender area between my big toe and the ball of my foot.  Smaller daughter warts surrounded the mother wart, a cluster that on especially damp days looked like a cotton ball.  When wet, these warts swelled to twice their original size and resembled Stay-Puff Marshmallows.  Their stark white blossoms stood out noticeably from my tan Cuban skin. These warts offered me hours of surgical practice.  With a pair of nail scissors, I would dig deep under the skin in search of the visible black pearl.  Ripping it out, I’d watch in eager disgust as the wart filled up with blood, spilling over across my foot and dripping onto the yellow shag bathroom rug.  Tears would sprinkle from my squinted eyes, but manipulating the pain felt too good to stop.   My warts were a way to self-inflict forbidden pleasure, a pleasure that we are supposed to loathe but secretly love.  At a time when so many other pubescent changes – boobs, periods, armpit hair – seemed out of my control, my warts allowed me to be the boss of them.  I hated my new body, my new hair in places where it wasn’t supposed to be.  But I couldn’t very well pick at my new sweat glands under my arms, or attack my breasts with a pair of tweezers and nail scissors.  But the warts….they, too, were external deformities that could do some damage without actually damaging my body.  As good as the wounds felt, the satisfaction of controlling my body felt even better. Despite knowing that my surgical procedures were actually helping my warts thrive rather than hindering them, the delight of spending hours hunched over my feet in the bathroom well outweighed the downfalls.  This entertainment often ended with my whole foot numb, bleeding, and tightly bandaged.  My mother encouraged me to become a dermatologist so I could play with other people’s warts.  “Some people just have a way with fungus,” she said with a hint of pride.     Sometimes I would cut a whole wart off, sawing through the skin with my little scissors until it dropped into my eagerly waiting hand.  I would rush to my red microscope, placing the felled wart on the glass slide and flipping to the highest magnetic power.  “You always liked science,” my mother would say when she caught me peering with awe through the lens.  I could stare for hours at the fungus, waves ruffling through the pale surface of the wart, the dark seed bobbing along the ripples.     Not only were these warts persistent, they were painful, too.  Plantar’s are notorious for impeding mobility, and by the time I had twenty-four on my feet I hobbled around the house in misery.  Even my mother, a notorious non-worrier, finally thought that something might – might – be wrong.  Her own mother was a hypochondriac, and after years of growing up in a house where my grandma was dying day after day (be it from constipation, a hangnail, or a bruised leg) my mother developed a resistance to worrying about “illness.”  To this day, she has an eerily high tolerance for pain and has never been one to comfort us over a skinned knee.  Or even a broken leg or small stab wound.  When I was five and cracked my head open (for the second time) in a department store, my mother calmly took a disposable diaper and taped it around my head before loading us in the van and taking me to the doctor to be stitched up. But low and behold, my hobbling and wailing finally paid off.  I proudly showed my mother the bruised and bloodied bottom of my feet, which finally prompted her to purchase Dr. Scholl’s wart remover – little medicated bandages you placed over the wart.  Covering the twenty-four warts required using the whole package in one sitting and resulted in two baby warts being born the very next morning.  Apparently, mine were super-warts, encouraged rather than scared off by Dr. Scholl.  My mother bought topical spray and anti-wart gel, none of which prompted any change.  This was usually fine by me, as my warty feet provided an easy way to keep my kid sister away.  I’d run, too, if someone took of their socks and waved knobby ogre-feet at me. My mother took me to Dr. Scheer, a local dermatologist.  He had the longest ear hair I’d ever seen—silver and white tendrils wrapping around his earlobe.  I had plenty of opportunities to ponder the sheer volume of hair sprouting out each of the four times that I went to him.  On the first two visits, he “froze off” all twenty-six warts.  This meant he dipped a long Q-tip into a Styrofoam cup, steaming from the liquid nitrogen inside.  He’d bring the smoking swab towards my foot, rubbing the concoction over not only the warts, but the skin around them as well.  I’d howl in pain, doubtful he could even hear me through his hairy earplugs.     The freezes didn’t work.  It was time to take drastic measures, so on the third visit I had the warts surgically removed.  Dr. Scheer stuck long needles into each foot, injecting a numbing solution under the bumpy skin.  When I could no longer feel the scalpel poking my heel, he began to slice away.  I watched in awe as he cut out each of my twenty-six warts, throwing them into a plastic cup he had waiting on the counter.  Then he swathed my foot in bandages, gave me crutches, and let me go home.  He threw the plastic cup away before I had the chance to say my goodbyes.     Three days later, I removed the bandages to find gaping holes along with the remnant roots and seeds of twenty-six warts.  “Maybe it’s because your feet sweat,” he said when I went back in for a fourth visit.  Maybe—my high tops were pretty moist.  Today, warts are supposedly cured by cutting out small pieces of duct tape and placing them over the white mound – something about the glue in the tape works as a medication stronger than any over-the-counter bandages.  But this was before the days of the duct tape miracle, and after explaining that we had exhausted all the conventional treatments he knew of, Dr. Scheer reluctantly admitted there was one last resort we could try.  He prescribed an industrial strength deodorant and sent me on my way.  His scribbled instructions read: 1.    Soak feet in Epson Salt for thirty minutes before going to bed. 2.    Dry feet and apply deodorant. 3.    Secure plastic bags over your feet using masking tape. 4.    Remove bags in the morning. My mother was assigned baggie duty.  After drying my feet, she would apply a thick white coat of the roll-on deodorant over the soles.  Then she engulfed each foot with a plastic sandwich baggie, securing them around the ankles with masking tape and sending me off to bed.  I hobbled from the bathroom to my bedroom, trying to avoid my sister, who stood laughing in her doorway, pointing at the baggies and asking “Can I use those in my lunchbox tomorrow?” By the time I snuggled under the covers—Clorox scent still fresh in my nostrils— my feet would be on fire.  The industrial-strength deodorant would eat away at my skin, causing an overwhelming hot itch on both feet.  I’d hobble out to the family room with tears streaming down my face, crunching the baggies with each step.  After a good deal of my begging and whining, my mom ripped them off and soothed my feet with cool water.  This went on for six nights before we gave up.     My twenty-six warts and I lived in harmony for a few months, our friendship interrupted by only one attempted remedy.  My mother read about this cutting-edge treatment in Good Housekeeping—rub a penny on the wart, throw it in a fountain, and wish for the warts to be gone.  I threw twenty-six pennies in the slimy Public Park fountain and secretly wished for a new tennis racquet.  The next day my mother brought me back and instructed me to rub with nickels.  If pennies didn’t work, a $1.30 would.  $2.60.  $6.50.  My father made us stop when we asked him for twenty-six one dollar bills.  I had no new tennis racquet, which I fully blamed on my warts.     Two months after the fountain incident, my Cuban grandparents came to visit.  It was a Hoosier July: hot and unbearably humid.  Sweat would stream steadily between my freshly-formed breasts and my cursed teenage inner thighs brushed together so much that I developed a rash.  The warts were at their best, thriving with a dull pain in my muggy yellow Chuck Taylor’s.  My Abuela caught a glimpse of my feet one afternoon when we were lounging by the backyard pool.  Lifting her huge faux-Chanel sunglasses from her eyes, she leaned in close. “Dios mio,” she said as her sweet perfume wafted towards me.  She called Abuelo over to my chair to investigate.  He labored intensely, inches from my pool-wrinkled toes.  Straightening, he smoothed his shirt over his potbelly, adjusted his pants (my abuelo wears long pants year-round, no matter the temperature), and clucked his tongue.  Abuela followed him inside, whispering all the while in rapid Spanish. That evening at sunset, my whole family trampled down the long, sloping backyard towards the soybean field.  I cantered along, slightly happy at the prospect of being baggie-free for life – it was time.  Along the way, my dad broke twenty-six branches off the huge oak tree next to the shed.  My sister carried a spool of pink yarn and rubber dishwashing gloves, my mother a camera and a tin of paprika.  At the bottom of the yard, I slipped off my mint green jelly shoes and wiggled my moist, knobby toes around in the dry yellow grass.     I squatted down on the yard, facing away from the setting sun.  I took each stick my father handed me and rubbed it thoroughly on all twenty-six warts, glaring from the corner of my eye at my abuelos standing a few feet away.  With each new stick a sigh of relief escaped from both their mouths into the thick air.  Part of me loved them for noticing to begin with, part of me hated them for insisting we “do someting about de problem.”  After the twenty-sixth stick had been vigorously rubbed, my mother sprinkled the paprika in a circle around my body, then added a dash to each foot for good measure.     “Don let dem touch de ground,” Abuela reminded in her thick accent, pointing her bejeweled finger at the branches.     When the ritual was complete, my sister tied the twenty-six sticks together with the pink string.  Facing east with the low sun warm on my back, I swallowed the lump in my throat, fearful that this treatment might actually work.  Without my warts, I was lost…what else could I occupy my time controlling?  With a sigh of defeat, I threw the bundle over my left shoulder and walked away, without looking back, as instructed.  My abuelos clapped, my mom snapped pictures, my sister performed a celebratory cartwheel. I woke up the next morning with twenty-seven warts.