Warts Don't Come Easy
'The last thing you want to hear from a health professional is that something on your body has spread roots and formed a colony.'
On a hot summer day in 2003, I sat on a dirt road at my grandmother’s dacha, busy placing rocks on a toad’s back.
Spared any extra weight, the toad—even with her small size—used to jump several meters. Now, the four dusty rocks prohibited much movement. Surprised by the sudden interference, the toad sought its escape the only way it could: by crawling.
I remember the pleasure I got from studying the toad’s skin. It was dark green, with protrusions like hard pimples all over its back—a frog’s armour. It felt rough as I ran my finger over it. I wondered what the toad felt with all the rocks on its back. Did it feel like it was doing something useful, say, working a long-haul delivery? Or did it just feel tortured by a five-year-old imbecile?
The idea to play with toads came from my grandmother, Tanya, whom I stayed with during the summers at the dacha. When she was little, my babushka made a straw from hay and stuck it up the toad’s ass. Then, licking her lips, she’d take the available end in her mouth and blow as hard as she could. The result was that the toad’s insides inflated like a balloon. Occasionally, my grandmother confessed, she overdid it, and the toad would explode—its inside contents flying into the faces of her friends standing nearby, mesmerised by the spectacle.
“It was very funny,” Tanya told me.
She was like that.
Here was a woman who had built an entire private cemetery for all the previous generations of her cats: Glasha, Bilka, Cleopatra, Musya, Bilka II—most of which were hairless. Dacha owners would come to the forest to pick up mushrooms, carrying their wicker baskets, oblivious that they were walking over cat corpses.
When my babushka learned that I, at the age of six, had been invited to an old man’s home "to look at his candy," she took her husband’s air rifle and, limping (she was recovering from an accidental fall into the pond), went in search of what she called "The Stinking Pedo That Lives Around The Corner."
Later, when older boys bullied me and yelled profanities outside our house, she’d take a wet towel and slap one of the boys across the face.
“That’s for being such a little bitch,” she hissed at the sobbing fourteen-year-old named Pasha, whose face was now marked with a fresh red stain. “And if you call your parents, I’ll smack them too!”
Several summers later, Pasha overdosed on heroin.
There was a sizeable population of toads around our dacha—much thanks to me. As a kid, I loved to hike to the nearest fire pond and bring back bucketfuls of tadpoles. They looked like little black sperm, moving around chaotically, and I dumped them by the hundreds in my babushka’s little pond, where she used to grow lilies.
Then, when the time came, and tadpoles turned into full-sized frogs, my grandmother would crush a few with her rubber slipper. She’d curse and yell.
“Where did these bastards come from?!”
And I’d laugh because whenever my grandmother got angry, her face would flush bright red, her eyes would bulge out, and the combination was hilarious.
At first, it was just a red pimple on the outside of my left hand. Then two more, just below it. The pimples grew larger by the day, and at one point, they changed colour. What used to be red turned yellow, and before I knew it, they became hard to the touch—like armour. A flash of realization hit my six-year-old brain.
Was I turning into a toad?!
I’d heard of people who touched toads and got warts. Some said it was a myth; others swore it was true. Yet none of these people had warts, at least not on the visible parts of the body. On the other hand, I had no opinion on the matter—and yet, my left hand screamed louder than any possible argument.
“Don’t be stupid,” my mother said. “It’s probably just some skin infection. It’ll pass.”
But it didn’t. After several weeks, what I mistook for pimples kept growing and multiplying until most of my left hand was covered in hardened, yellow warts. I was becoming a toad, and now even my mother grew anxious. And when you’re a kid, few things worry you more than your mother as she studies your once-human hand with a disgusted look on her face.
Back then, we lived in northern Moscow, a district called Otradnoe. The local clinic smelled of antiseptic and had painted red walls, perhaps to cover bloodstains. The doctors were all unsmiling men with moustaches and bad breath. How they looked at my mother—about the same age as I am now—made me uncomfortable, though I couldn’t understand why back then.
The second we entered the dermatologist’s office, he quickly looked at my hand and said, “Someone’s been playing with toads.”
You had this too?! I wanted to ask but kept quiet.
“We’ll have to get rid of those; otherwise, it’ll only get worse,” Mr. Moustache said and got up to wash his hands in the sink. Never in my life had I felt so dirty before.
“Alright,” the six-year-old me replied, wanting to take matters into my little toady hands. “We’ll make an appointment.” I looked up at my mom, hopeful we’d go home now.
Mr. Moustache smiled and said, “Little man, what appointment? I’ll do it right now.”
Before I could even draw a breath to let out a cry of protest, he walked out of the room into a smaller one and, seconds later, reappeared with what looked like a bucket of steaming water. He put on yellow rubber gloves, dipped a cotton pad in alcohol, and took my hand.
The pain was unimaginable. If I’d watched Fight Club at six, I’d connect that moment with the scene in the movie when Brad Pitt puts acid on Edward Norton’s hand to send a message: You are not the pain. But back then, I was just a six-year-old who played with toads, and as far as I was concerned, I was the pain.
My hand began steaming, and the pain intensified. I attempted to snatch my hand back, but Mr. Moustache was holding me tight in his meaty grip.
“Keep still,” he ordered, a bubble of saliva appearing on his lower lip. “You’re a man.”
The way he said it—much more than the pain—was what made me finally cry. To this day, every time people tell me I should tolerate something because “I am a man,” I feel like punching them in the face.
“What’s this stuff?” my young mother asked, looking as terrified as I was—except her hand wasn’t burning.
“Liquid nitrogen,” Mr Moustache replied as if he’d just been asked the date and responded with “January thirteenth.”
As I type this sentence, I look at my left hand and see three small scars as a perpetual reminder: never trust a man with a moustache.
Fifteen years whooshed by. On a spring morning in 2020, in an era that now seems as far-fetched as when I played with toads, I find myself wearing my new Nike sneakers in Verona.
My then-girlfriend Angelina and I had just arrived in Italy—a spontaneous trip from Moscow. Writing this sentence makes me pause and sigh. It was still a world where you could do such a thing.
As I laced my sneakers, I noticed my feet felt hotter than expected. Still, it was February. I remembered my mother’s famous words—“Never trust the warm weather in cold seasons!”—and decided to ignore the fact that my feet wouldn’t breathe for several hours.
All Italian cities look the same—their narrow streets, cafés, secret passages, dust-coloured buildings, and laundry hanging from the balconies. We spent the day walking around Verona, which isn’t a city but more like a large village filled with tourists from America. We ate pasta al pomodoro and stopped at Juliet’s balcony, where I grabbed the statue by the copper chest and yelled to Angelina, "C’mon! Take a picture! Now!" to the dismay of locals and the laughter of a group of Asian tourists. Later, looking through the photos on my iPhone 9, I noticed that Juliet’s chest was scratched off—meaning I wasn’t the only Romeo in town if you know what I mean.
After a good lunch and a bottle of Prosecco, Angelina and I took a tour of Lake Garda. The water was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen—blue, cold, peaceful. In the distance, you could see the white peaks of the Alps and Monte Baldo.
Back at the Airbnb, I exhaled in unison with my feet as I took my sneakers off. We had walked 30,000 steps that day, and I expected to see bloody blisters on my toes. But when I took my right sock off, I paused. My middle toe seemed to be covered in something black and porous. I went to the shower and rubbed my foot with soap, assuming it was a piece of sock or dirt, but nothing happened. If anything, the more I rubbed, the blacker my toe got.
“Angelina!” I yelled. “Come in the bathroom—I want to show you something.”
When your mouth says something like that, you know you’ve reached a special moment in your relationship.
“Are you sure it’s something I want to see?” she called back from the living room.
“Just come in here!”
The look on her face as she entered the bathroom told me that whatever it was, amputation wasn’t off the table.
Two days later, back in Moscow, my foot got worse. The few black spots on my middle toe spread like fire until two of my toes had turned completely ash black. My foot started to hurt, and I began limping.
I took a photo of my foot and sent it to my mother with the question, "What do you think this is?”
She called me back, screaming that I should see a doctor immediately. She let me go only when I swore I’d make an appointment that day.
Angelina began calling my foot “it,” as in, "Whatever it is, if it touches me, I might throw up."
I moved to the couch.
Two days after we arrived from Italy, I went to the clinic in my mother’s CSKA neighbourhood. It’s an area of new, modern-looking buildings in Moscow, home to one of the largest stadiums in the country. My mother and sister had moved there recently after my parents split up.
The dermatology clinic was in the next building over, which my sister had frequented recently due to a case of warts of her own. Looking back, I am astonished that the obvious never occurred: our family was cursed.
The dermatologist’s business card read Dr Loseva, meaning “moose." Dr Moose looked like what you’d imagine an Instagram influencer who had aged poorly. You could see she’d been pretty at one time but suddenly wasn’t, and that seemed to make her angry with the world—but most of all with herself.
She used the familiar ty pronoun when speaking to me, as though I were a preschooler, and bossed me into her office like an army general.
"What’s that you’ve got there?" she barked as if I’d come in with a tail growing out of my back.
I positioned myself on what looked like a dentist’s chair, took my right sneaker off, and showed her my black toes.
"Ah, Christ!" Dr Moose roared—which, I must confess, isn’t the reaction you want from a healthcare professional. I half-expected her to yell, GET THAT THING OUT OF MY OFFICE!!! But Dr Moose suddenly grew serious and poked my toes with a pen she used to write down something in her notebook minutes before.
“Ouch,” I said.
"How many are there?" she asked, ignoring my cries.
"How many of what?"
“Warts. What else does this look like to you? Look at the black dots—those are the roots. God, there’s at least 30,” she muttered, not waiting for my answer. “Might be forty. Or fifty. You’ve got an entire colony here.”
None of this was reassuring. The last thing you want to hear is that something on your body has spread roots and formed a colony.
I recalled my six-year-old self and being in Mr. Moustache’s office with my mother.
"But I didn’t touch toads!" I exclaimed.
“What?” Dr. Moose frowned and walked out of the room. I expected her to return with a bucket of liquid nitrogen, like in my childhood. Instead, a girl not much older than me showed up, holding a camera and lighting equipment.
"Here, take this for my Instagram," the doctor said, pointing to my toes.
The assistant hesitated but took photos of my foot from every angle.
"That’s it—good. Now take a video while I poke it," the doctor said and proceeded to poke my porous warts with a toothpick.
“Oh!” I yelled.
“Shh,” Dr. Moose hissed at me. "You’re ruining my content here."
More people arrived—some wearing lab coats, some as though they’d been picked off the street to watch. Before I knew it, the room was filled with an audience, all sharing unsolicited opinions as if I were invisible. My infected foot hung there like a trophy, cameras clicking around me.
I couldn’t shake the feeling of pride. This is what pregnant women must feel like at a scan where they get to see the result of all that sex-having. Or when people congratulate them on the streets.
That’s right. I did this. I gave birth to a new life.
Dr. Moose looked at something on her phone, smiled with satisfaction, and then back at me.
“So. Fifty warts will be a flat rate of $10 per wart, which’ll be $500."
Right then and there, I should’ve had the sense to get up and leave—to limp out of that clinic and find a real doctor. For all I knew, this wasn’t even a real clinic—it could’ve been one of those places where women got breast implants and lip fillers that made them look like they’d been stung by bees.
Instead, I asked, "Do you do bulk discounts?”
The procedure didn’t take long once the local anaesthesia kicked in. Dr. Moose—who I later learned wasn’t even a real doctor—burned my toes with a laser. It didn’t hurt much, but the smell of burnt flesh filled the air. What made it worse was the realization that the burnt flesh was mine.
"The pain will last for several days, but then it’ll pass," Dr. Moose said once she was done. "You won’t be able to walk properly."
"For how long?" I asked.
"A month."
"What?!"
"And do me a favour—don’t attend public pools. See what happens when you go where other people go?"
I wanted to respond that every place is where other people go, but arguing was pointless. I paid my bill, hopped outside the clinic on one working leg, into a cab, and limped home.
The next day, as I unwrapped the plastic bag Dr Moose had given me to protect my raw, meat-and-bone open wound, I discovered she’d left a few warts untouched.
I called the clinic back and asked to speak to Dr. Moose.
"Oh," she said. "Really? Well, come in again, and we’ll finish the job. If you don’t, it’ll spread again like fire, and you’ll have a new colony before you know it.”
I hung up and studied my right foot, which looked like Gus Fring’s blown-up face in Breaking Bad. Several new black warts stared back at me from the opposite toe.
I looked at them and thought about the frog from my childhood. The image of it crossing the road in two big leaps, as long as I didn’t weigh it down with rocks, of course.
I sighed. Maybe that’s what living was, in its essence. Carrying your load, whatever shape it took, wherever it came from, and hopping on to the next place. Rocks or no rocks. Warts or no warts.
On and on and on and on and on.
Away from someone who might or might not stick a straw of hay up your ass.
And—God forbid—blow.
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I don't know whether to laugh or cry! At least I now begin to understand why East Europeans and Russians are so tough and seem to be immune to much of the pain and discomfort we westerners complain about !!
Painfully hilarious🥲