Wart Is Hell....

Well, give it up for Mr. Z -- the boy did a stellar job at the doc today. I had to drag Miss O along for the ride, and I really wasn't expecting the whole experience to go very well. Frankly, I was expecting lid-flippage the likes of which I have never seen.

We got there and the boy was instructed to take off his shoes and socks and air out his pointy ol' foot horns. The doc came in and explained the dilly-o, Mr. Z rolled over onto his belly and the fun began. He told me he was going to bypass the numbing of the area because the needle is usually more painful than the freezing process itself. A bold stance, but he sounded confident, so I went with it. So he started by slicing off the rough dead skin parts of the two or three bigger warts -- the megawarts. Mr. Z was reading some Disney magazine and didn't even flinch. So far, so good.

Then the doc pulled out this little funnel thing that he proceeded to fit neatly over each protruberance. Then he pulled out his can o' freon, or whatever the shit that is, and started blasting away. That's when Mr. Z began to protest. He definitely didn't flip his lid, but he did let loose with his trademark "Hey! What the heck?!" a couple of times. It sure looked painful, lemme tell ya. After the doc would pull off the funnel thing, the wart would turn into a little white dome -- kinda like a little foot igloo. A "foogloo." Had I not known that the foogloo was a gnarly, flakey wart moments earlier, I might even call it "cute." Like a teensy penguin might waddle out of it and honk a tiny "Hello, stranger!" to us.

He made like four foogloos and then gave Mr. Z a break. (There were six on one foot and three on the other, by the by. It was wart-a-palooza down there, I'm tellin' ya!) Throughout all of this, Miss O was just staring at the war(t) zone with a horrified look on her face and, oh, she was also plugging her ears. I think the whole thing was pretty traumatizing to her, and I think the doc picked up on that. He asked Miss O if she'd like to do some drawing out in the hall at the nurse's station. She yelled, "WHAT?!" about three times, then I pulled her fingers out of her ears and she obliged.

Then I told the boy that we were halfway done, and that's when he got a little upset. But it was a "within-normal-ranges-of-upsetedness-for-an-eight-
year-old" kind of upset, which is HUGE for him. I calmed him down and the doc got back to his foogloo makin'. About 15 minutes later, it was over. The boy pulled on his socks and boots, hopped down from the table and that was it. Fucking trooper, that boy.

I didn't really mention that we're going back in two weeks for another round of foogloo makin', and that, sometimes, it takes multiple visits until the things are finally uprooted. Why kill the post-freezing buzz, ya know? I surveyed the damage tonight and, while they look less menacing than they did, I'm pretty sure they're gonna have to be zapped again. And I found tiny one that the doc missed, too. Fuck.

But I have to say, had this been done a year or two ago, Mr. Z would still be in that fucking office screaming his ass off. It's truly amazing the strides that boy has made in the last couple of years.

If only those strides hadn't been through the stagnant, viral cesspools of the YMCA lockerroom.