For 30+ years, no make it 40 or 50, I’ve had a callous on the bottom of my left foot. I think it’s there because that foot stopped growing after I had polio as a child. That foot is about a size smaller than the right foot, yet I always buy shoes to fit both feet, so it’s sliding around inside a shoe that’s too big for it. Needless to say this callous has become the bane of my life, and it’s probably too late to start buying shoes to fit the foot. Over the years, especially the past twenty or so, I’ve tried everything I heard about to try to cure the callous. Doctors have made attempts… sometimes. Generally they look at me with that “well he’s gonna die soon enough from something so why spend a lot of money and effort on this?” look.

Somewhere recently – I don’t recall whether I was doing an active search or just stumbled into it – I ran into a suggestion (I think it was somewhere in www.ehow.com) that a slice of lemon can reduce the pain in a corn. Callouses are like corns, I thought; so, why not give the lemon a try? The past week or so I’ve gone to bed with a slice of lemon, ensconced in a gauze pad held on with copious adhesive tape and sheltered in a plastic sandwich bag, by all of that firmly attached to the callous on the bottom of my foot. In the morning when I remove it, sometimes some old skin wants to come off – I know “TMI – sometimes not, but all in all the callous is less bothersome. It’s still there, and it still hurts a bit, but it’s better than it has been IN YEARS.