“Poison Ivy, Poison Ivy.
Late at night when you’re sleepin’
Poison Ivy comes creepin’ around.”
Becky and I hiked to the butterfly pasture in the low meadow to take sunset pictures of the beautiful ironweed which is right now in its violet glory. Got some pretty good shots, especially after I wadded into the grass to get close-ups. Then we walked back home.
“She’s pretty as a daisy
But look out, Man, she’s crazy.
She’ll really do you in
If you let her get under your skin.”
Some advice: Don’t go walking in high grasses and weeds without being properly dressed. I knew better. Yes, I was wearing long pants and boots, but I had on low running socks. Later in the evening, I began to itch around my ankles. Really itch. Of course I scratched. Scratching is another thing I know I shouldn’t do.
According to my virtual doctor, WebMD, scratching doesn’t necessarily make it worse, but you can break the skin and invite bacterial infection with the germs under your fingernails. Okay, I tried to resist the itch, but it wasn’t easy. Found a tube of anti-itch stuff in the medicine drawer and smeared that on. It helped. A little. But still it was a fitful night’s sleep.
Late at night when you’re sleepin’
Poison Ivy comes creepin’ around
My left ankle especially was covered with a bumpy red rash, and now both my legs were developing itchy red spots. I had to do something, so I went to CVS. All I said to the pharmacist was, “Poison Ivy?” He wheeled around, went to a shelf and gabbed a bottle like he had done this before. It would likely do the trick.
“You’re gonna need an ocean
Of calamine lotion.”
It was a spray bottle of something called Ivy-Dry Super. It had different active ingredients than calamine lotion, but I figured I’d give it a shot, I mean, a spray.
With Becky’s help, we spritzed the affected areas. Thankfully, the poison had not spread and the affected areas were limited to my feet and legs. The cool spray mist felt good, and I’m sure it wasn’t just my imagination that very soon the itching settled down so I could think about something else. Over the next few days, the redness of the rash abated somewhat as did the incessant itching. As of now, the rash seems to mostly have run its course.
To me, the curious thing about this poison ivy episode is that I don’t remember ever in my life being so severely affected by it. As a kid I was warned: “Leaves of three, leave them be,” but even when I ignored that, although friends sometimes were infected, poison ivy never seemed to work its evil powers on me.
Now, so many years later, here I was struggling with the itch and scratch. My real, non-virtual doctor once told me that allergies can suddenly appear where there were none before. Is this seemingly sudden sensitivity to poison ivy yet another sign of aging?
As I delved deeper into the world of poison ivy, I found an interesting article by Meghan Overdeep in Southern Living. Scientists have evidence that the surface area of poison ivy leaves has grown bigger since the 1950s, and urushiol, the allergenic oil in the plant, has become more toxic than before. The culprit? More abundant CO2 levels in the atmosphere due to climate change.
I guess it is cold comfort to think Global Warming might be to blame for my allergies rather than me just getting older.
All I know is, composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had it right when they wrote:
“Chicken pox’ll make you jump and twitch,
A common cold’ll fool ya
And whooping cough can cool ya,
But poison ivy, Lawd, will make you itch!”
