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Dangers of Hurricanes,
Poison Ivy, and Taking Your Husband's Word for It
(By Stacy Jones, September 17, 2005) |
The
hurricane has made me itch. Literally.
Maybe I cannot reasonably blame
my present malady on the remnants of the storm that passed through
the Mid-South on the evening of August 29, but if that hurricane
had not spun her way through the area, I might not have been
left with such a terrible itch.
I will have to concede, first of
all, that coming out of the ordeal with an itch on my arm in
no way compares to so many of those to our south whose lives
were obliterated. But I thought it a little humorous that a hurricane
could-in indirect fashion-work another kind of evil towards a
person.
The storm didn't wail too loudly
by the time it reached Memphis. It had lost a significant part
of its momentum after staying on land, and Memphis was on the
outer reaches.
After all, the passing of Hurricane
Katrina hardly measures up to the devastating 100-mile-an-hour
straight-line winds in summer 2003 from our own unofficial "Hurricane
Elvis," which hurtled towering midtown oaks to the ground.
Nevertheless, Katrina did leave
many Memphis yards cluttered with clusters of leaves and littered
with limbs.
So the Saturday after the storm
my husband and I began our cleanup. We took it in stride, considering,
again, that some people had fared much worse.
Mike chewed up some of the leaves
in the front yard with the lawn mower, while I swept, raked,
and picked up the debris from the driveway and the back yard,
where we have two large oaks.
Then we got industrious. Since
we had already devoted half a day to our yard, we made a decision.
After most of the obvious debris now resided in black plastic
garbage bags at our curb, we would clean the fence row in our
back yard.
On the surface, this seemed like
a good idea. Weeds and vines were overtaking the plants that
belonged there. And twigs from several small trees and bushes
on the neighbor's property were beginning to pop over through
the slats in our fence.
So Mike and I snipped and clipped.
We pulled and snatched. Some of those vines were 20-feet long.
At one point I asked him, "There's not any poison ivy out
here, is it?"
"Oh, no," he reassured
me. His answer reaffirmed something I should have already known:
question everything, even the words that come from your husband's
mouth.
The effect didn't happen immediately.
It took a few days. But then it hit. And how.
Mike, who taken off his shirt in
the heat that day, had an ominous red patchy area on his back.
I knew from the magnitude of it that no mosquito had induced
that ugly lesion. The patch was growing so large and leprous-looking
that I was afraid we might have to take Mike to the city gate
and have him beg for alms, as some were forced to do in Biblical
times.
We surmised the culprit might be
poison ivy.
Then, after a few days, I produced
my own lesions.
Mine were restricted to my left
arm. I've always been somewhat ambidextrous, using my right hand
to write and my left hand to do almost everything else, so this
evidence convinced me that I may be more of a lefty than I had
originally thought.
The blisters bubbled up in three
distinct patches: one on the top of my left hand, one on my wrist,
and another on my forearm. I thought breaking them and releasing
the fluid would make them go away more quickly. I read on the
Internet where, contrary to popular belief, some argued that
it did not make the lesions spread. Supposedly, the problem occurred
where the poison ivy came in contact with your skin.
They did not go away any more quickly.
The growing problem, as with anyone who suffers from this malady,
was that I needed relief. I joked with my husband that if I were
a child, I'd have already been slathered with calamine lotion.
My arm would by now be sporting a thick, pink cast of the solution.
I scoured the Internet for home
remedies to relieve the itch. Some sweared by a poultice-like
solution created by wetting the skin and putting table salt on
it. That remedy didn't work for me.
Someone else vowed that turning
a hair dryer on the highest heat setting and aiming it at the
affected area until you almost burned the skin would do the trick.
The burn receptors would overpower the itch receptors, and, voila,
you'd have some instant relief for a couple of hours. This person
was right.
But I only resorted to this measure
once or twice. I figured that almost burning the skin off your
hand repeatedly might not be so good for the skin.
Finally, after two weeks, one of
the lesions has now dissolved into a slight red scar. The other
two are no longer blisters, but rather two less itchy whelps
that appear as though they are on the verge of dissolution.
But I've learned a few tentative
lessons from this little experience. First, don't get too industrious
when cleaning your yard, and if you do, wear long-sleeves and
gloves. And perhaps bathe straightway. Most of all, however,
question everything-even your own husband.
(Stacy Jones, a Southerner,
is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University
of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns,
which appear on Saturdays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.) |
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