Wart story? Sure, why not.
I have only had three warts in my life that I can recall. My father being a dermatologist, I had two of them removed in the professional way- a cryojet full of liquid nitrogen, shooting a needle thin jet of the stuff to cause localized frostbite and kill the virus-laden cells. It stings and you then get a small black circle that eventually peels off, but it's highly effective for treating all manner of things, including pre-cancerous spots and keratoses.

Skipping forward a few years, I now live about 600 miles from my parents. I work for Honeywell in a testing lab, where we had liquid nitrogen handy in a tank almost as tall as I am. We were doing physical testing of polymer samples, which involved deep freezing molded samples with liquid nitrogen to measure their impact strength when frozen.

So one day I noticed a lump on my index finger, and kept an eye on it for a while. Sure enough, it was a wart. I know it's not dangerous, but being a little OCD about rough patches on my skin it irritated me to no end. I wasn't going to be seeing Dad for at least a few more months, and in any case he usually doesn't carry liquid nitrogen around with him, so I decided to take care of it myself.

I got out the steel container that the lab techs used and took it to the nitrogen tank. I opened the valve, pouring out what seemed to be huge amounts of liquid nitrogen, but in truth the stuff was hitting the (relatively) hot steel and flashing to vapor, so it took a little while for the liquid nitrogen to accumulate in the container. By this time the room was knee deep in fog and the container was coated in frost, but I could see a puddle of liquid at the bottom. I didn't have insulated gloves on, so I had to work with the container where it was. Using a long handled swab, I got a drop of it transferred to my finger, then another. It felt like a red hot needle on my finger, but I was determined.

At that moment one of the lab techs walked in. She saw me, half hidden in a swirling fog bank as I knelt by the tank, my face contorted in a grimace of pain and determination as I pressed the swab to my finger, and looked up at her with a grim expression. All that was missing was a Vincent Price laugh.

She wouldn't come anywhere near me for a while.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 25 Jan 2011, 14:36, 4 replies)

And the wart...?
I used to love playing with liquid nitrogen - I had to use a lot of it for cooling samples and would wile away boring moments by freezing various things to see how they would react. Cheese sandwiches were good fun.
(Smale is stuffed, Tue 25 Jan 2011, 15:01, closed)

Oh, complete success. Gone within a week.
Liquid nitrogen is really fun stuff to play with. Freezing a stalk of grass and shattering it startles the hell out of people. Pour it down a flight of stairs and it makes a ghostly waterfall.

My dad once used some leftover to freak out a particularly obnoxious dog by pouring out a dollop in front of it, resulting in a soft poof and a cloud. The dog retreated a distance and started baying at him.

My sister brought some to her high school biology class that she was teaching, along with a variety of things to shatter. One of the thugs in the back of the room said, "What if I stuck my dick in it? I bet that would make it stiff, huh huh huh." She responded by wordlessly freezing a carrot and shattering it violently on a lab bench.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 25 Jan 2011, 15:16, closed)

Clicking your reply

( idonthaveafunnynickname Drink-Aware? Sure. I'm aware I want another drink., Tue 25 Jan 2011, 18:18, closed)

liquid nitrogen
the cause of one of the best horror movie deaths i've ever seen
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Tue 25 Jan 2011, 17:41, closed)