Merry Foot-Rot To You: The Story of My Monday and Tuesday

So Monday night we went to a Christmas party. I was really freakin' tired from the week-end (more on that later. Yes, we're going to work backwards because then maybe I will get back to the first part of the week-end, which was magical), but the party was fun. My friend Collette usually hosts now, since we all had so many damned kids and they all got so damned big, and she has the biggest house so we don't have to be reminded of how many damnably large children we've all produced the whole time we're there. We all had a great time at the party and then we came home. Then the kids got their pajamas on and they were reading in my room for a few minutes before going to bed. I went into my room and Angus was lying on my bed with no socks on so I decided to take a look at this wart he's had on the bottom of his foot for a while because Matt had mentioned that he thought it was starting to bother him. So I lifted up his foot and looked at the bottom of it. Then I barfed for four hours and tried to rinse out my brain, then I googled wet gangrene and fatal foot fungi on the internet and then I called my doctor's office and said please call me in the morning and give my son an appointment so he can continue to enjoy the many benefits of having two feet. Then we went to bed. 

The next day (Tuesday) the doctor's office finally called but they couldn't see him until Wednesday. Then he got to my Mom's after school with a fever and then we basically traded phone calls between me, my Mom and my husband for a couple of hours wherein my mother tried to diplomatically suggest that I was guilty of child abuse and neglect if I didn't come get him right this instant and take him somewhere to have his foot examined and/or operated on/cauterized and cryogenically preserved, I tried to figure out how I was going to do this and get Eve to her last dance class of the year where she was supposed to dance IN HER PAJAMAS using her TEDDY BEAR as a PARTNER (translation being no friggin' way was this class suitable for being missed) and my husband wandered around in various cell-phone-deadening parts of his building and surfaced occasionally to be yelled at. One of these conversations went something like this"

My Mom: "that's not a wart." 

Me: "well I know it doesn't look like one now but it did until yesterday."

 My Mom: "warts don't have blood blisters and pus in them."

 Me: "I KNOW that. Those weren't there before. It just looked like a wart." 

My Mom: "You should have taken him before now." 

Me: "For a wart?" 

My Mom: "It's not a wart." 

Me (grit grit grit) "I KNOW that but until yesterday we thought it WAS a wart and I couldn't exactly take him to the doctor and say we have a feeling this might turn out not to be a wart, so what should we do when that happens?" 

My Mom: "I've never liked your hair that way."

 So my husband went and got him at my Mom's house and took him to the clinic and I took Eve to dance. The verdict: It's a wart. His body just isn't as down with warts as many bodies are and this is its little way of not making the wart welcome. She suggested Compound W. Oh, and he has a virus. By way of comfort, at dance class my friend Patti told me she totally would have assumed necrotizing fasciitis too. 

I talked to my sister last night and she reminded me that I should probably just not talk to my Mom about this again, since there is every probability that she will say "I knew it was just a wart. It's too bad you all overreacted so badly", and then my head would be in actual danger of exploding. 

Happy Wednesday, and may all your feet be shiny as Christmas bells and HPV-free for the holidays.