A childhood belief about skin

When I was eight, I read this book called My Mom The Frog. It's about a boy and his sister, and the boy's sister tells him that if you touch a wart you will turn into a frog, and the story focuses on this frog that gets into the boy's house after his mom kisses a wart on his finger, and the boy and his sister and friend think the frog is the boy's mother.

Well, since I didn't get a chance to see on the side of the book if it was labeled "fiction," I didn't know if it was fiction or not, and what if it was nonfiction?! My mom worked as a substitute teacher and I kept warning her every day, "If one of your students has a wart don't touch it or else you'll turn into a frog!" My mom and dad kept telling me that wasn't possible but I refused to believe them.

I got so freaking terrified of that book that I didn't even like frogs in general, and I would cringe whenever I heard the word "frog" (this happened when I developed a fear of moles and gerbils for a few months that same year too). My classmates thought it was great to say "frog" over and over in my face to make me wince.

The mania over this book got heavy, and my mom even took me on the Internet to research warts. It, of course, said nothing about turning into frogs upon touching one, but I still thought that was possible. It wasn't until I got to the end of the book and found out that the mother had been at the store buying wart cream the whole time, and the frog was just some random frog that got into the house. THAT was when the mania over all that ended.

Four years later, I ended up with a wart on my pinky, but no one turned into a frog over it!