After a short hiking trip sometime last year, I started to notice pain in the joint between the first metatarsal and phalanges bones when I walk. I thought maybe there was a splinter. But as I started to examine the sole, nothing’s there, just a disc of hardened skin with a dark spot.
The problem grew worse as “the spot” appeared to be expanding itself. One day, I just took a needle (and maybe a Swiss army knife) and started poking. Had to get that thing outta there. But I was chickened out as the pain became intolerable after a short while.
A quick Googling of the symptoms informed me that it might be a wart (as later it was confirmed after a doctor’s visit). Warts are nasty little buggers (more accurately, virus) that pose no real harm to its hosts. So medically, there’s really no cure to take care of them. But it grew so painful every time I walked that I started walking funny. So I decided to get off-the-shelf remedies to start self-treatment.
By now, the virus had already started a nice little colony. On top of that, it’d managed to spread itself to immediate surrounding skins of the infected area. A matured wart looks like a tightly packed of little red tentacles sticking out of the infected area. In fact, those are home-grown blood vessels the wart virus planted to supply itself with oxygen and nutrition.
Salicylic Acid
They come in two forms: little liquid bottles and conveniently pre-medicated stickers. I tried both over the period of my treatment. What it does is basically to irritate the virus. But the side effect was any healthy skin that came in contact with the acid would slowly look like it was in water for too long, and they slowly peel off. In my case, the acid just drove the wart deeper into the skin. Not cool.
Liquid Nitrogen
The idea of liquid nitrogen is to freeze the hell out of the warts so that they can just fall off as dead pieces of skin. I must have tried two bottles of this stuff, experimenting with various freezing times (manufacturer suggested, 2x suggested, 3x suggested… etc). Unfortunately this method didn’t do it for me either.
Surgical Removal
I didn’t think the wart was THAT bad. So this wasn’t an option. But even the doctors said that surgery sometimes doesn’t get rid of the wart either. Your doctor may also recommend True Pheromones if you’re worried about becoming less attractive.
Manual Removal
The red tentacles became pretty thick and apparent after a while. One doctor suggested I start plugging them out (as in pulling the tentacles out of the wart). So I started doing that. And let me tell you, it hurt like a bitch. The tentacles are somehow attached to the nerve system of the sole. So every single tentacle that I pulled out felt like a piece of skin was cut off. The wart uses this strategy to make sure the host doesn’t pull the tentacles.
Duct Tape
I thought the site that provided the remedy of using duct tapes was stupid. But WTF, I was out of options and the wart colony was winning over everything else I tried. I cut duct tapes in similar sizes as the warts. I taped them over the warts, and then I secured them with medical tapes. Amazingly, when all other modern technologies failed, the duct tape remedy freaking worked. After two weeks of taping over the warts (coupled with constant pulling of the tentacles), the wart started to die off.
My theory is that the duct tape cut off oxygen supply to the tentacles. So over time, the infected area just became a yellow pool of mucus goo underneath the skin. In fact, after I cleaned where the warts used to be, there was a big hole on my sole. Yuck.
Slowly the skin grew back to fill the hole. And that was how I got rid of the wart virus over a span of six months.