I have much news to report, but the most current is that I have been beset with a number of poisonous skin rashes of the variety that are exacerbated by the recent heat and humidity. Concurrent with the recent move from one city to another, I’ve also managed to catch back-to-back viruses, like a mild flu, that have allowed me to function at a basic level but no more. Last week was definitely a low point, but at least the move is over, and the cardboard boxes are not multiplying anymore like they were for a while. I still can’t find a few key belongings, mostly related to my tech gadgets, but for now that’s no big problem.
Settling in, I was thinking it would be a really great stress reliever to go out on the nice backyard deck we have at the new place, inhale the fresh breezes of our small urban but very green yard, and just relax. I also enjoy digging my hands in the dirt and just cleaning things up as a way to let go of the cares of the day.
After a few tries at this, however, I’ve discovered just how much poison oak and poison ivy there is on our relatively small lot. This is perhaps one of the big downfalls of moving into a place that has been somewhat neglected for the last decade, but also happens to be located in a very enthusiastically fertile spot. The weeds going crazy are one thing… but this degree of poison-whatever is just ridiculous.
Last week, I figured I had learned my lesson about the poison oak all over the back and would just focus on the few small beds in the front, where nice day lilies have finally bloomed but where lots of weeds have also grown very tall and needed to be shown who’s boss. I was expecting a visitor the following day and wanted the yard not to look quite so slummy. So I spent less than an hour or so clipping away at some items and yanking up the biggest offenders—not that much stuff, but I ended up with three armloads of material to haul to my growing pile of organic refuse semi-hiding under an evergreen tree with low-hanging boughs I recently pruned a bit so I can see under it.
As I worked, I noticed what looked like poison ivy in the actual flower bed in the front yard. How did this happen, I wondered? Did someone actually plant poison ivy here?
I regarded the front of the house again with skepticism. Has it been hexed, I thought? Are all future gardeners forever cursed on this property? I stupidly handled all these plants and brought them in bare armfuls to a pile. I tried carefully to avoid what I imagined could be poison ivy but inevitably got some of it on me.
I happen to be highly allergic to such poisonous plants. It could be worse, I suppose, and for just about anyone with this allergy, it’s unpleasant and lasts for days. I have an overly amplified sense of just how allergic I am.
It started some years ago, when my family and I were living with my in-laws in a small, ad-hoc space they gave us in their fairly large home. We were sharing one bedroom for the five of us, which had room for two queen-size beds crammed together as well as all our clothing. This is where I was crashed out for a few days in a row after I unknowingly used some tainted “outdoor facilities” at a local playground where we lived at the time. I remember it was early spring, and apparently too early for the port-a-potty there to be open: it was padlocked, and I really had to go, and I found a little hillside out of view of the playground where there was just some low ground cover. A friend I was with never mentioned to me (until later) that she already knew the low hillside was covered with poison ivy—she was more familiar with that playground than I was.
A day or so later, I noticed a rash that resembled the shape a toilet seat might make; I wondered if I had some sort of staph infection from a dirty toilet seat. In my confusion over what I could have, I looked up a natural remedy for treating such an infection; it included making a hot compress of garlic and cayenne powder.
As the rash grew angrier and angrier, and I grew less and less mobile, I had my husband brew up such a compress, and I laid there in bed with the compresses on me, replacing them when they cooled off, unable to get up or even roll over onto my back without a great deal of pain. My rear end swelled like a red balloon around the area of my tailbone, and I had to walk bent over and slowly on those rare occasions when I did actually get out of bed. Placing the hot compress on the rash felt good in a painful sort of way, like when you scratch a mosquito bite compulsively until it bleeds. I figured the way it stung was somehow part of the recuperative healing process, and besides, it could not be much worse than the itchy, painful rash untreated.
During this time, I was also nursing my younger son. My husband would bring him to me in bed and I laid there feeling more depleted than ever. I probably got mastitis again around this time, as I did so frequently during those days of so little personal space and such high demands on my time and energy. Compounding the problem: stupidity in self-diagnosis.
Finally my health situation had worsened to the point where my mother-in-law assertively arranged an appointment for me, at her expense, with a very good osteopath she recommended nearby. I went to see him under great physical duress. I laid down on his exam table and he took one look at my bottom. “This doesn’t look like a bacterial infection to me,” he pronounced. “This looks like an allergic reaction. Are you sure you haven’t changed detergents or something recently? Used the outdoors as a bathroom somewhere?”
I laid there on my belly and gave this a moment’s thought. “Yeah,” I said, “I tried to use a port-a-potty last week, but it was locked, so I…”
Hmm.
“I did pee in some ground cover. It could have been poison ivy.”
Hmm. I suddenly felt very, very dumb. When I told the doctor what I had been using to treat the rash, he could only offer his deepest sympathies for the pain it must have been causing me to place boiling hot cayenne and garlic on a poison ivy rash. We discussed how these types of rashes can worsen over one’s lifetime. If I had any kind of oversensitivity to poison ivy before, it was cemented into my DNA now. Indeed, I don’t know that I could have done more to help introduce my body to the toxins in the poison ivy’s oil, and in effect, tell it, “You will overreact to this now and for all time.”
The doctor told me I had options: he could prescribe steroids, for example, but I’d have to stop nursing. That was an option for me to avoid, I said. Alternatively, I could take the homeopathic remedy Apis, which is used to treat bee stings among other things, and apply the zinc oxide diaper rash ointment Desitin to the rash, which rapidly renews skin cells. I chose the latter route, relieved at last to know what was ailing me, and to have some remedy that might help it get better rather than continually worsen it and add to my immobility. I started to feel better right away, although as the doctor warned, the rash got worse first.
He said it would appear all over my body. I would see it surface in constellation-like patterns, everywhere, basically in accordance with the lymphatic system, which is all over the place but has nodes and concentrations in various spots. And that was the case. My entire body itched; red dots appeared everywhere and were made worse by heat and sweat. But I kept up my treatment, which took longer than it would have taken if I had gone the route of steroids, and eventually it all went away.
Now, of course, when I see poison ivy around, I do my best to steer clear of it, but I’m such an enthusiastic gardener that I do have the tendency to ignore what could be problematic—especially when it’s so unexpected as to be in a small garden bed in one’s front yard.
I steered clear of the poison oak in the back because we had spotted it early on. Doing some light weeding work, I did everything I could not to touch it; as it worked out, I got one single dot of a blister on one arm, near the wrist. My older son was much less cautious and has now gotten two bouts of the rash on him, but he doesn’t react as badly as I do, and it’s under control and fading (and hopefully he’s learned his lesson, too). In reaction to my single dot, however, a two-inch radius of rash broke out on that wrist, and then I had a sympathetic lymphatic reaction across my arms, legs and belly—not a direct contact with the poisonous oils, but a lymphatic memory, an expression of some kind. I dealt with it as well as I could.
Then came the weeding and the additional contact. Through all of it, these viruses and an extended road trip during which my health worsened for a spell and I came down with laryngitis. I’m ready to get better now, but in the meantime, I’m covered with Desitin again, which happens to smell like cod liver oil. Today, after putting it all over my neck and jaw, my children stared at me, and one said, “You look scary.”
I hope the house and I can reconcile sometime soon, and that it will allow me to garden in its yard. This will not be a happy long-term relationship if that aspect doesn’t work out.