Last Sunday, on Mother’s Day, my present to my wife was doing the yard work projects she’d been meaning to do. My reward for my efforts has been a very, very nasty case of poison ivy rash that I am still dealing with over a week later.
I am in itchy hell and the rash is still forming.
In my telling of this tale, you will either shake your head at my ignorance or learn something if you ever find yourself doing yard work and encounter poison ivy in the form that got me.
The last task of my Mother’s Day yard work present was to clean some strange vines off the large tree in our front yard. I was smart enough to wear gloves because I didn’t know what the vines were. These were more like snaking wooden branches than vines, complete with bark and a wood-like interior. It never crossed my mind that it could be poison ivy because I’d only ever seen that plant in its small, green, and houseplant-like form. I had no idea that, when left unchecked and attached to a tree, it thickens and grows bark.
If you didn’t know that either, now you do. Because now I do.
The rash appeared slowly, and because neither I nor my wife (who has dealt with repeated poison ivy exposures in her past) immediately thought I’d been handling poison ivy, I didn’t think to wash my arms as extensively as I should have. I gave them a more “casual rinsing.” That wasn’t enough. By the time the rash began to itch, it was established.
And because poison ivy exposure can come in waves instead of all at once, thanks to your skin absorbing it at different rates, the rash has been spreading across my arms at an insidious rate. I look like I’m wearing bracers on my forearms, and despite wearing a shirt when handling the sliced branches the rash has spread across most of my abdomen on one side, and days later than the arms began to show signs of exposure.
This really sucks. I am in itchy hell, I am covered in calamine lotion that is only partially relieving the itch, and every so often my willpower fails and I scratch the rash to my immediate regret.
And on top of all that, my wife and son won’t come near me. Despite medical claims that poison ivy rash isn’t contagious, they’re not taking any chances. They both recoil if I get too close when passing them in the halls of our already-small house, and I haven’t been touched in any capacity in over a week. For a physically affectionate person like me, this is Hell.
I’d gone a full forty six years without ever being exposed to poison ivy. My unexposed streak has finally been broken, and boy did poison ivy get me good.