The wart on my hand
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The wart on my hand is taking up a lot of my time. It’s on my right hand, south of the pinky. Only a couple months old, it’s a resilient foe, as I have been digging, picking and tearing at it since it appeared. I took it casually at first, bought some liquid wart remover from CVS and didn’t give it much thought. That was a mistake. I’m now locked in a bloody, painful battle with my own body.
Why it’s so teeth-grindingly satisfying to rip at your own body, I don’t know; it just is. Warts, splinters, cysts, blackheads, the loose teeth of youth, we just can’t leave them alone in spite of the pain.
I expected the heart of a wart to be like cauliflower, but that’s only on the surface. Deep down they are made up of fleshy stalagmite-like pods that appear easy to tear out. But they are firmly rooted deep in my flesh and only through great pain and copious amounts of blood loss can I tear them out. But even then, after explicative-laden sessions, they reappear like little middle fingers taunting me.
Twice, through a studied process of using the wart remover, tearing, picking and prying, I have ripped the wart down to skin level, reveling in victory each time. But both times the bastard resurfaced.
Aesthetically, battlefields are not pretty and my hand is no exception. Each bloody skirmish ends in coagulated blood and scabbing. So as new scabbing, time and extra layers of wart remover are added, the battlefield becomes hard and rugged and blood black.
I know doctors are equipped to succeed where I have failed, and I may not be able to win this war alone. But I owe my foe more than that. The wart deserves the death of a samurai; it should breath its last breath on the field of battle, not in a sterile environment funded by an HMO.
What I lack in this offensive is the right equipment. I’m convinced that if I had a tiny winch and a scalpel I could finish the wart off. I would fashion a tiny wood scaffold mounted with a block and tackle system. On one end would be the winch, on the other a small clamp that I would affix to the individual wart pods. Then, I’d winch the pod up as high as my pain tolerance would allow. Finally, with the scalpel, I would quickly slice through the pod’s base, severing its obstinate hold on me. It would hurt like hell and bleed like a river, but the satisfaction would be orgasmic.
Alas, there are no wart winches for sale. And so I am left staring at this mess, defeated.
Über will be Patrick Quirk's wart winch.