I’d never had an allergic reaction to poison ivy until a few years ago. Even then, the worst I got was a quarter-sized red spot on my wrist with a few tiny blisters. It itched alright, but was gone within a few days. As a kid, I never had a reaction to it.
Last Friday, I must have come in contact with it again while yanking the crabgrass growing among our black raspberries. It might not have been the contact along the underside of my forearm alone that did it. The first thing I noticed on Friday was a light scratch from one of the raspberry canes. Ivy does not have thorns; raspberries do. No biggie, I thought. Wash it down with soap, hit it with some isopropyl alcohol, dry it off, and go about my business as usual.
Yeah, except that over the weekend, the area around the scratch got blistery, red, and very, very itchy, but not warm. The red itchy area followed the exact contours of the scratch. If the scratch had gotten infected, it would be warm, not itchy, and it would not have blistered. Between Sunday and now, the darn thing, which started out as a 1/2″ scratch — not even a real cut, but a scratch — has ballooned into half the size of a dollar bill. Judging by a side view, the thing has swollen up a good 1/4″ from the surrounding tissue. The center of it is about 2″ above my bony wrist, so it’s easy to tell it’s crazy puffy. It still seems to be spreading, but the good news is that it is confined to that general area.
I’m pretty good about yanking new poison ivy vines out of the ground where they show up (with gloves), and hitting old ones growing up trees with Round-Up. Still, it’s a gamble reaching way down into a raspberry patch to yank crabgrass. I don’t have much way of knowing what else is lurking down there, and poison ivy loves the shade of taller plants.
At this point, I have to assume that I will show up at my nephew’s graduation party with this giant superultramegamaxi itchy welt near my wrist. It’s going to go away by itself, but really, it should have been gone by now. I must be getting sensitized to it, for some odd reason. Go figure.
Color me shocked. Today, the localized itching has degraded to mosquito itch level and is not so red, although my lower arm is still puffy, down to basic hive reaction.
End of it. Yay!
Might not have been poison ivy. There are other poisonous weeds out there. Like oak and sumac. I had the misfortune of catching a full-body case of poison sumac a year ago… seems that shit spreads when you scratch… along with a couple of gastric ulcers.
So. There I was. In the hospital for gastric ulcers, but nobody wanted to touch me because I had head to toe blisters and itches.
Yay.
One kind nurse brought in a tube of heavy-duty prescription strength hydrocortisone cream and put it on my table. She said “I could get in trouble for giving you that.”
I slid it under the sheet and said: “Giving me what?” Blink, blink. She smiled and left. I bless her sweet little heart to this day.
Aiyyi yi yi, Leppy! Makes my super itchy puffy seem like nada. Glad you plowed through it.
Nobody’s blisters are better (or worse) than anybody else’s. Misery is misery. I’m glad yours got better.
It’s not unusual to become sensitized to poison ivy with repeated exposure. Happened to my mother. I’m still unaffected, but do try to avoid it, just in case.
I try to avoid it, too, but this time around I didn’t know it was hiding down there until after the fact. At least now I know it’s in there, somewhere, when it comes time to harvest the berries, so I don’t go wading into the patch in shorts and sandals. Rain gear and hunting boots would be a better choice.
Interesting. Ice packs help. Mostly, I grabbed one to keep the swelling in check, but it does have the added benefit of numbing the area, so the itchiness isn’t as obvious. We’ve got a couple of tubes of anti-itch cream, one of which has double the percentage of the active ingredient, but neither works all that well. I’m sure hydrocortisone cream would do a better job than this diphenhydramine hydrochloride, but the latter is all we’ve got at the moment (besides the blue ice packs).
Glad you’re better. About ten years ago I had a run-in with *something* that gave me a full-body rash. Didn’t go to the hospital, but I suffered for days and days. Then again, I have the kind of super-sensitive skin that breaks out if you just look at it the wrong way. Tangentially-related, but the mosquitoes have been awful here in NE PA. I’m so sick of being their buffet. 🙁