Sally Breslin: My Life: RECALLING A FEW OF THE OLD-FASHIONED HOME REMEDIES

There was a surgeon on a TV talk-show the other day who said that until he moved to New England, he’d never heard of Bag Balm. He said he first became aware of it when he noticed that a lot of his patients were coming in for their post-operative visits with the balm smeared over their incisions.

Bag Balm originally was manufactured in New England as an ointment to help relieve the cracking and chafing on cows’ udders. Over the years, however, it became touted as a cure-all for humans, for everything from burns to psoriasis.

“I swear I’ll never cease to be amazed at some the strange home-remedies people come up with,” the doctor on TV said, chucking and shaking his head.

I couldn’t help but wonder what he would have thought if he had been able to see me at that very moment, sitting there with a piece of aloe plant duct-taped to my shin.

Allow me to explain. About 10 years ago I developed this tiny red bump on my leg. When it grew to be about the size of a pea, I had my doctor take a look at it. He said it was a harmless cyst that eventually would go away on its own. Over the years, it did get smaller, but it never completely disappeared…which really bugged me.

Anyway, a few days ago I happened to complain to one of my friends about the huge, ugly, disfiguring cyst on my shin (okay, so maybe I exaggerated just a tad).

“I know how you can get rid of it in less than a week,” she said “You take a clipping from an aloe plant, turn it inside out so the juicy part is on the outside, then tape it over the cyst using duct tape, making sure it’s air-tight. After that, do not, not under any circumstances, peek underneath the tape for five days. When you finally take off the tape, you’ll be amazed at the results. It works on skin tags, too."

I still don’t know whether it was curiosity, desperation, or simply a desire to prove that my friend should be locked up in a padded cell, but I actually ventured out of my house to buy an aloe plant. As I write this, I’m on day four of Operation Cyst Removal. The burning desire to peek underneath the duct tape on my leg is keeping me awake nights, but I’m holding back, mainly because I’m afraid of what I’ll find underneath there. I mean, for all I know, the aloe has sprouted roots and is growing somewhere deep beneath my skin.

In the past, I’ve done even stranger things in the way of home remedies. I still can remember, back when I was about 10, my friend’s father telling me that if I wanted to get rid of the wart on the back of my hand, all I had to do was cut an onion in half, rub it on the wart, then spin around three times and toss the onion over my left shoulder. This, he said, should be done three days in a row.

In retrospect, I think he was just joking with me, but being a kid, I believed him because after all, he was an adult. So I secretly borrowed a couple onions from my mother’s 5-lb. bag underneath the kitchen sink and did exactly as my friend’s dad had instructed. The problem was, we lived in the city at the time, so when I flung the half-onion over my left shoulder, it went flying over the fence and into the neighbor’s yard. I can only imagine what he must have thought when he saw an onion lying in the middle of his walkway.

Then there was the onion smell to contend with. The first day of my wart-ridding secret ritual, my mother kept wrinkling her nose every time I came near her.

“Go take a bath,” she finally said. “And then we’re going shopping to buy you some women’s deodorant. I think you’re old enough now to start using it.”

I ended up having the wart removed by a dermatologist.

The juice of the mighty onion wasn’t used solely for warts, however. One of my ex-boyfriends used to squeeze it into his ears whenever he had an earache. Believe me, it was a great way to discourage me from ever leaning over to whisper sweet nothings into his ear.

There were many other remedies when I was growing up that were so bizarre, I would have preferred to suffer a slow and agonizingly painful death rather than try any of them. My grandmother, for example, firmly believed that leeches were the answer to everything that possibly could go wrong with the human body. Leeches, she said, sucked only the “bad blood," allowing fresh, healthy new blood to replace it. So she always kept a big jar of the squirmy creatures handy on her kitchen counter just in case something like an infection or an attack of lumbago popped up.

And my other grandmother, who was from Canada, swore that for a sore throat, swollen glands or the mumps, nothing beat the “old sock” remedy, which involved filling a long stocking with baked beans or salt pork and tying it around the neck, leaving it there for several days

I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect that the reason why the sock remedy resulted in so many speedy recoveries was because the smell of old baked beans and rancid salt-pork made the patients so nauseated, they completely forgot about their sore throats.

Kids nowadays don’t realize just how lucky they are not to have grown up during the “oil” era, when parents shoved castor oil and cod-liver oil down their kids’ throats to keep them healthy. It’s a wonder we didn’t create oil slicks whenever we went swimming, because I’m pretty sure the stuff was oozing out of our pores.

And if, heaven forbid, after choking down all of that nasty-tasting oil, we still caught a cold, there was Father John’s Medicine to combat it.

If you had a good imagination, it kind of tasted like oranges. It also was a heck of a lot better than my grandfather’s cure for a cold – drinking a shot of kerosene. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised when he died of a severe stomach ailment.

For “female” problems, especially those that involved heavier than usual blood loss, my mother was a fan of a tonic created way back in the 1800s, called, “Lydia Pinkham for Pale People.” For the heck of it, I checked it out online just now, and it’s still being sold in a “modified” form.

Sure, some of the old home-remedies might sound ridiculous in this modern day and age, but it’s not fair of me to “pooh-pooh” them until I’ve actually tried them myself.

Which reminds me…tomorrow I finally will be able to take a peek under the duct tape on my shin…and see if my aloe plant needs watering.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning humor columnist and the author of “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” “Heed the Predictor,” “The Common-Sense Approach to Dream Interpretation” and “Christmas, a Cabin and a Stranger.” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.