I was a swimmer through middle school and part of high school. I hated wearing flip flops and tended to lose them– so I walked barefoot on the pool deck. I have had my fair share of plantar warts, my first having been scraped off in a pediatrician’s office. My mother is fond of telling another wart story in which I pulled the band-aid off, and the wart started coming off with it. I fainted off of the coffee table I was sitting on.

I didn’t develop any tolerance for pain until I was 22, so fainting was a common problem I fought often. I started getting tattoos, had my thyroid out, and grew a tougher skin.

That being said, after my VSG surgery in May, I powered through my recovery, walking a few miles a day a week out, and heading to Philly for a training and a day of adventuring with my best friend a week after that. I pushed my body too hard, and my kidney stones punished me with two nights in the hospital.

Two weeks later, the wart came. It started out hard and small, really just a nuisance for a few days, until it popped out of the skin. I had never seen a wart like it, pink and live and healthy, no black dots. I started treating it with apple cider vinegar-soaked cotton balls, band-aiding them to my foot and running three times a week, working full time.

The skin around it turned white, but it continued to grow, healthy as ever. Every morning, I would shower, cut off the dead skin around it, wrap it up with some ACV, and be on my way. I would do the same when I would redress it every evening after work. Nothing helped. In fact, it seemed to flourish under its conditions, doubling in size every week. After a month, I was done. It had quadrupled in size, and was only flourishing under its ridiculously hostile conditions.

Three weeks after I returned to work, I went to a podiatrist, expecting him to scrape the thing off and everything to be okay.

He surprises me by saying that not only was it not a wart, but that it was a soft tissue mass, with a deep stalk, that needed to be surgically removed as soon as possible. I was not allowed to run, exercise, put any strain on it. I was told to start treating it with betadine, putting barrier gauze on it, and that they would try and fit me in as soon as possible. Post surgery I would need at least two weeks off and be non-weight bearing on my right foot. No working, no exercise, no walking, for two weeks. Also, my incision was going to have to be a few inches long, shaped like an S on the upper ball of my foot so that he could have enough skin to draw the site shut.

Fast forward ten days, and they gown me up, write YES on my foot, and excise it. He sends it away for analysis.

It comes back as a pyogenic granuloma, which is a mass of blood vessels the body creates as a response to hormone changes or trauma. Those two things are basically in the definition of bariatric surgery, but the record of them online is far and few between. That’s why I’m writing this. I want there to be more pictures online of what it could look like, because mine did not represent the things that come up when you google PG.

So, symptoms of my pyogenic granuloma were:

sensitive and painful to the touch

a clear perimeter around it

pink in color

easily bleeds under pressure.

grows quickly– mine went from 0 to 100 in a month

Alright, now for the gory good stuff. Here’s a gallery of the PG. The first picture was taken July 9th. The last picture of the PG was taken August 10th, a month later. The remaining photos are of my incision, purple and angry and ridiculously inconvenient. Also, dry and cracking.

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I hope this helps anyone who is suffering with these. My podiatrist told me that he had only ever seen one on a foot, and it was in the exact place I had mine. Just my luck, right?