The Alien in My Right Foot

Today I saw the chiropodist about the verrucae in my right foot and was transfixed for half an hour by his scientific lecture on the phenomenon of veruccae and viral infections. Turned out he did his dissertation on verrucae, luckily for me. I’ve had two on my right foot for some weeks now and my beast of an immune system has been fighting off the viral infection that causes them and giving me quite a bit of gyp along the way. It’s one of the many variants of the human papilloma virus. Apparently viruses are not strictly speaking living organisms as they only have four out of the seven criteria that denote life and the strain that causes verrucae are very clever at hiding themselves from adult immune systems so my own system has done well to seek them out and attempt to destroy them.

The first one died last week. I gave it a tug and out came a – thing – the size of a Jelly Tot. It was awesome. The second one is still in there but it’s on its last legs and should be dead soon. I feel like I’ve been invaded by an alien entity. It’s quite horrible. And it’s stopped me from running; for the first couple of weeks I could barely walk because it was so painful. Anyway, my poor old foot is on the mend so I thought I’d cheer it up by drawing its portrait this morning against the backdrop of my be-socked left foot. It’s all cwtched up with padding and plaster to ease the pain when I walk. It was fun observing how the round spots on the sock are distorted and drawing them accurately.

The drawing is in Faber Castell Pitt pens, sizes S, F, M and B with additional shading in FCP greytone pens and 6B graphite block into a Daler Rowney A6 sketchbook.