The Poison of Poison Ivy: part 1

I’m not even sure which poisonous plant is truly the culprit, but I blame it on poison ivy because I have no idea how to identify poison oak or poison sumac, and in all truth, it doesn’t matter. The poison is the same in all of the plants. So, poison ivy it is.

I’ve debated whether or not to write this particular piece. It’s rather personal. It’s more personal than I thought I’d go when I first devised this travel memoir slash gimmick-to-get-me-published slash blog, and I’m still a little hesitant. Then again, the reckless side of me is screaming, “Do it! Do it! You’ve been doing it anyway…”. My addiction to wearing my emotions on my sleeves is rather parallel to that of an adrenaline junkie. I have a nasty habit of throwing myself out there, all caution thrown to the ferocious, unforgiving winds, just to see if I can make myself relatable to the public. I think to myself, “I can’t be the only one going through these sort of things. Maybe if I’m willing to talk about them, others will feel safe to do the same.” I know I sometimes come off whiney. I sometimes (most times) come off melodramatic and a little ridiculous. And I even sometimes (most times) come off pitiful and pathetic. But while I am most definitely all of these things, so is everybody else. I have a rather reckless faith in my audience, believing that they just might, just maybe, embrace my humanness as their own as opposed to throwing tomatoes at my head. Reckless faith, I said. Reckless. I’ve had tomatoes thrown at me…

But I’m going through with this entry anyway. I sort of need to, therapeutically. And if I can attain an audience from it at the same time, all the more therapeutic. So, I’ve decided to share with you, Reader. I warn you ahead of time: this entry involves some personal health issues, as well as some personal romance issues, as well as some personal personal issues. The squeamish, beware. The health issues are the worst… But they’re key to the emotional stress, and when you read about them? You’re going to feel very sorry for me (all memoir writers hope for this...). You’re also going to judge me. But that’s a risk I’m willing to take to tell this story. Bare with me now. Believe it or not, all of this does have to do with hating Minnesota. This is sort of a prelude to this weekend’s camping trip in the Apple River valley, place #4 on my Twelve. And it all begins with poison ivy.

That’s how it all began fifteen years ago, almost to the very day in fact. We moved to Minnesota in August 1995. School wouldn’t start for a few weeks yet, so my brother and I had taken to exploring the ten acres we now lived on. We grew up in a neighborhood. Having land was sort of new to us. We amused ourselves with the cat and four kittens left behind from the previous house owners. We were also put to work by our parents, building stalls in the pole barn and putting up a paddock fence for when our horses would arrive. The land needed clearing, and my parents bought our very first ride-on lawn mower, which to us suburbeons meant: tractor. It was not a tractor. But we used it like one.

Driving it around through the knee-deep over-grown woods was fun. Fun, meaning it took my mind off my friends and relatives and my whole life being hundreds of miles away, and having to start a new school in a few weeks. So. I spent a lot of time chasing the “wild” kittens in the heavily weeded woods, and I spent hours on our “tractor” mowing through brush in the wildness of our acreage. Little did I know that poison ivy grew on the property, and little did I know that I was very, very allergic to it. I romped all day in the woods back in New York, and never had a case of it. But I moved to Minnesota, and….well.

I thought they were mosquito bites. I had been eaten alive one day, chasing little black Buzz (one of the kittens) through the weeded woods. So I scratched. I tried scratching until they scabbed because, based on previous experience, this usually ends the lifetime of a bug bite. So I kept scratching. The itch was like nothing I’d ever felt in my life. It was flesh deep, bone deep, and it flared up like gasoline on flame. I remember crying in the shower, using my razor to scratch myself and making myself bleed. Then I cried simply because I was grieving the loss of my home and was now having to deal with what I had thought to be demonic, poisonous Minnesota mosquitoes.

Using an entire tube of anti-itch cream, I went on still thinking that it was mosquitoes that had done this to me. It was in my first morning class on the first day of going to my new high school that I noticed my bug bite was now leaking. It was oozing. My jeans were getting wet. This didn’t make sense to me. I tried to hide my wet spots on my jeans all day, crossing my legs in all sorts of positions, rushing to sit at a desk in the back of the room, hoping to all hope that nobody would notice my jeans and think that I was unclean, or disgusting. I was mortified. ‘Just what I needed while trying to make new friends. I wanted to be invisible. And believe me, I got what I wanted.

Eventually my mother recognized my condition to be poison ivy. I had no idea how destructive and horrible the poison is to your skin. I had always thought it was nothing but having the itchies. A lacey rash. It’s just poison ivy. ‘Put some anti-itch cream on there, take a benedryl, and dry it up.

No. It is not like that at all. There’s no such thing as “just poison ivy”.

It’s more like having angry boils on your body that swell up into these tumor like patches and ooze puss with a constant flow. On top of that disgustingness, the itch never, ever goes away. You can put gallons of anti-itch cream on it (while smearing around the puss which spreads the condition and makes it worse) and receive a simple surface relief that might, if your lucky, make you comfortable enough to sleep for a full hour before it wears off and wakes you up in the middle of the night, finding yourself absent mindedly scratching your patches until they’re all one, blazing hot fire of itch… But there’s always that bone-deep tickle that never, ever goes away. It is always on your mind. You can’t watch television without thinking about it. You can’t talk to friends without thinking about it. You can’t sit at the computer without thinking about it. You can't be at work without thinking about it. You can’t go for a walk because increased blood-flow worsens it. You can’t shower without being in mortal agony because warm water inflames it. You can’t dry yourself with the same towel twice. You can’t sleep in your sheets. You can’t be in the sun. You have to wash everything you’ve ever touched because the poison oil could be anywhere that you’ve been. You have to wash and medicate the areas at least twelve times a day to keep yourself from going completely insane from the itch. And you have to do this for weeks. WEEKS. In a nutshell, it’s completely, utterly, unfathomably maddening. It drives your wits to their very end.

I was finally taken to urgent care, and to be totally honest, I don’t remember what my first remedy was and how long it took until I healed. But I have been treated several times in my life for poison ivy, and every time I’ve been treated for it, it puts me through this violent wooshing of emotional stress. It reeks havoc on your mind and soul. Only people who’ve had poison ivy, and who are as allergic to it as I am, can understand this. I’ve had to be treated in the ER for it, when it became so out of control that it was making me sick. Like, throwing up and diarrhea for over a week sick.

So. When five weeks ago I began scratching the top of my ankle to see three teeny tiny pimple-like bumps that looked threateningly ready to ooze, my entire soul sank to the bottom of my very toenails. I knew what was in store for me. And though, sparing you the suspense, this was actually one of the most mild cases of poison ivy (thanks to all the work I did to prevent it from spreading) I’ve ever had, it was still, in another way, one of the worst. It ended up ruining a lot of good things. It ended up in places that it should not have ended up. It ended up sucking five weeks of my life away and ruining a lot of very important things that were supposed to happen this summer. You wouldn’t think a stupid little poisonous plant could destroy so many things, but it did. This is where you might find me unbearably melodramatic, pitiful, and whiney, Reader. There are, no doubt, worse things in the world than poison ivy. It’s stupid. It is. But let me explain this little devil weed’s chain reaction of destruction in my wee little meaningless existence, and maybe I’ll gain at least a minute ounce of sympathy from you. This stupid case of poison ivy not only effected me, but others as well. It was an exemplified torrent of misdeeds, this little devil weed’s doings. Poison is as poison does. And I’d like to share it all with you if you’ll let me…