Beetle Juice
‘Tis a long story as to how I came to be laid up on the front porch, high on Vicodin and vodka, and unable to walk without the aid of crutches when all I wanted was to be able to wear loafers again with no socks and without pain. Was it too much to ask?
Clearly it was, until I ridded myself of a particularly stubborn plantar wart the size of a quarter on the ball of my foot.
Oh, the plantar wart. It sounds so gentile, so Charleston Low Country. In reality, it’s just a common benign tumor caused by a common human papillimovavirus. Easy to catch. Difficult to eradicate.
Most plantar warts appear on the bottom of your feet. Pressure pushes them inward and a callus forms over the top. It’s like walking on a piece of pea gravel. Seven to ten percent of Americans have one.
My personal battle with the plantar wart began eighteen months ago. I’d soak my foot and then try digging and clipping it out. Each time, it would come back a little bigger.
I moved next to Salicylic acid pads, certain Dr. Scholl could help me out. There was, you know, an actual Dr. Scholl. A turn of the century podiatrist, he went on to start his own company producing patented foot care products, even selling arch supports to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the German Emperor.
The pads looked easy. Peel and stick; let the acid slowly kill the wart. Every two weeks, I’d cut away white dead skin and hollow out a crater where I thought the wart was located. It was messy, and I couldn’t really tell what I was accomplishing except for creating a painfully raw situation even worse than the damn wart itself.
Freezing treatments didn’t work either, so I ditched drugstore products for more avant garde treatments like smothering the wart with duct tape. While people swear it works by cutting off the oxygen supply to the wart, it did not work for me. Not even when I rubbed crushed garlic on the wart. Not even when I painted it over with fingernail polish.
I turned next to apple cider vinegar, or ACV as it’s known on the Internet. This is where you soak a cotton pad with apple cider vinegar and then strap it over the wart with duct tape. No luck.
I hit bottom the day I found myself contemplating bananas in the Whole Foods Market and wondering if organic might be better than conventional as a wart removal remedy. They say if you tape a banana skin to the bottom of your foot for a few weeks, the wart will disappear. I just might have tried it, but I couldn’t fathom walking around the next day in Manhattan with a banana peel squishing and rotting in my shoe.
Finally, I made an appointment with a podiatrist and begged him to just cut it out. Not a wise move, I learned, for the resulting scar tissue could be just as painful as the plantar wart itself. Instead, he started me off for a couple of weeks with a skin cancer cream to weaken the damn thing in preparation for Chinese blister beetle juice.
Yep, you heard me right. Canthardine is a substance derived from the blister beetle, of which there are 7,500 known species. The Chinese have used this ancient medicine for thousands of years. You paint it on the wart. A blister forms. When it dries, the wart comes off with the skin. No scarring.
“Sure, it’ll be a little painful,” said the handsome Washington doctor sitting in front of me with my foot poised dangerously close to his very ample crotch, “but you can handle it.” When he pulled from his pocket a little amber colored bottle with a black top, I couldn’t help but wonder—for just a moment—where this scene was headed.
The good doctor painted the beetle juice on my wart, bandaged it, handed me a script for pain pills, and sent me off to recuperate. It was all over in five minutes. So I thought.
When I arrived in Rehoboth, the bottom of my foot was hurting so badly I could barely get out of the car. The next 48 hours passed in a daze of booze and pills while the blister was forming. It felt as though I’d burned myself on the oven and couldn’t cool down the pain.
By day three, things began to slowly improve. After a week and still on crutches, I returned to my podiatrist, who lanced the blister, cut away the skin, and with a pair of needle nose pliers yanked out the blistered remains of the wart. Hell yeah, it hurt.
It’s been two weeks, and I’m walking, somewhat gingerly and somewhat fearfully. If but one wart cell remains, it will grow back. If it comes to that, well, I’ll just hit the juice again, because I sure am enjoying the feel of calfskin leather against a well-pedicured foot for the first time this summer. Some things are worth the pain.
Rich Barnett, an unabashed gay, liberal, tree-hugging, whiskey-drinking, Rehoboth cottage-owning story-teller, is working on a book. Email Rich Barnett