I have pretty ugly feet. Possibly I exaggerate. They are not that awful really. And actually it’s mostly the left one that’s ugly. The right one is pretty much a-ok. Though, it too suffers from dry, chapped skin, and heavy duty callus buildup. I don’t know what else to call it but callus buildup. It’s not technically a “corn,” I think. I am not sure what a “corn” is, but I am pretty sure it’s not one.
Just that on the inside of both of my big toes, one may locate a lot of what appears to be callus. The buildup is the worse on the left foot, so if I am in bed trying to go to sleep and I lie on my right side, sometimes the inside of my left big toe presses against the bed, and after a while, sometimes, the corn or callus buildup starts to hurt. Actually, the callus itself is pretty insensitive, but it starts to press on the sensitive tissues beneath it and they start to hurt. The pain of the hurt—though not in the least extreme—is enough to keep me awake.
All I have to do to keep the pain away is to wear a sock on the left foot. That’s enough to pad the callus a bit and keep it from hurting. So sometimes, I go to bed wearing one sock and walk around in the morning with one sock. Why I don’t wear two socks, I don’t know. But it’s only the left foot that really needs it. And I believe in airing out your feet whenever possible.
I believe in the airing out of feet because for years I had one whopper of a case of athlete’s foot. I would try this or that to try to get rid of it and usually failed through lack of patience and perseverance, and hell I am a live and let live sort of guy. But then they came out with this stuff—I forget what it’s called—but wham! That stuff really worked and all that really evil athletes’ foot between the toes went away. But I just couldn’t get rid of the dry, scaling skin on different parts of my feet, especially the heels.
I figured that was a really tenacious form of athletes foot, since athletes foot is really a whole host of different sorts of fungi (?) or funguses (?) that the powerful lotion had not been able to kill off. So when I was at the dermatologist I asked him if there was anything I could do for it. He sort of shrugged and said no; some people just get that stuff. Could be virus, could be genetics. Nobody knew for sure. Then I said, what about this callus buildup on my left toe here.
Hmmm, he said, maybe I have some salve for that. So he gave me a prescription for some salve to put on my left toe. Carol picked it up from me and I got a bit freaked out when the label on the box said, “Urea Cream.” I mean in my mind Urea had something to do, I was pretty sure, with Urine. I didn’t really like the idea of putting urine on my toe. So while I was complaining about it, Carol looked it up on the web for me and sure enough Urea is a central ingredient in Urine. Turns out there are about 1200 medical applications for Urea.
I wonder if any other form of excrement has so many medical uses. I also wonder where the urea I am using comes from. Human Urine? Horse Urine? Elephant Urine. Are there people out there who get paid to pee all day? Or maybe it can be synthesized.
