My sister had been a ballet dancer while we were growing up. Her feet were often bloody and blistered from her pointe shoes and i remember her rinsing them under cool water in the bathtub after one of her performances. My sister always had foot odor but i never did. All through our childhood i could wear shoes without socks and my feet never gave off the slightest odor. I was also used to my feet being pretty dry. All that changed with the addition of my second dog.
Cashew had a thing for feet. She wasn’t the type of dog to lick your hand or your face. She went straight for the toes. I chalked it up to being another one of her weird quirks. even if you were wearing socks she would lick the socks until they were soaked. She was by far the strangest dog i had ever met. At the time that she started doing this i didn’t realize that she also had a thing for eating her own poos. By the time i realized how bacteria laden her mouth probably was it was too late.
For the first time in my life i had foot odor. it smelled to me like half cooked/half raw dead-fish. It definitely had a fishy odor to it. Unfortunately, so did Cashew’s breath and her poo. The primary ingredient in her dog food was, after all, salmon. Dead fish was not really what i wanted my feet to smell like. It was worse. It was like a combination of bad breath and dead fish at the same time. The worst part of it was that my feet started sweating; something that had never happened to me before. My feet had always been dry, even when my underarms were dripping. Now in between the toes was wrinkly skin, as if i’d just gotten out of a pool after swimming. The shoes, the boots, the slippers…everything began to smell like dead fish and hot dog breath. This was a problem.
I waited until i had 2 days off and then i washed all of the shoes and boots in a solution of vinegar, baking soda, and laundry detergent. Then i hung them on the line to dry. The steel toed boots were too heavy for the laundry line so i set them on top of the car. then i filled a square baking pan with vinegar and baking soda and let my feet soak for about 10 minutes. After that, i slathered them with raw organic coconut oil to kill any lingering bacteria. Then i broke out the tea tree oil. I didn’t know what else to do. I threw all i had at it, but would it be enough to kill the salmon poo bacteria? I really didn’t know. I was suddenly sorry for all the times i had rubbed it in my sister’s face that i did not have the foot odor she suffered from.
i sort of trapped myself on the homestead for the day. I could not go grocery shopping or drive to town because i was washing every shoe i had. I was forced to walk around the muddy homestead in socks. Don’t ask me why i chose white. I had other socks. I guess i just didn’t care.