I seem to have terrible luck when it comes to poison ivy. You would think that by now I’d be able to spot it and stick clear, but it always gets on me when I’m in the midst of working and I never notice. This is now my third time getting it on me since moving to the ranch, and if nothing else, I’ve at least learned how to get ahead of it early. It turns out I’m highly allergic to the innocuous little plant. I mean sure, everyone breaks out when its foul, serrated leaves rub against the skin, but I REALLY break out. The itching goes through my flesh and down into the bone until it hurts. So much so that thinking becomes a challenge. I can process, albeit slowly, but writing or doing math are more or less impossible.

Scratching temporarily relieves it, but it has to be heavy scratching, and the relief vanishes as soon as I quit. My first time coping with it I accidentally lost some skin I scratched so hard. Needless to say it did not improve my situation and the blisters spread faster and farther. The second time was a little better, though still miserable. I started doing all the tricks I’d learned to help right away. It mitigated things for about a week, by which point the blisters still managed to spread to both legs, both arms, and were creeping up my neck and starting to put in an appearance on my face like especially angry zits. At my mother and fiancé’s insistence, I went to see a doctor and was given prescription steroids and a shot in my buttocks.

It’s interesting to note that the shot itself did not hurt nearly so much as the sensation of the steroid moving inside of me after, forcing itself through my veins. It was like I had been punched and then somebody was pinching the resulting bruise in an effort to spread it out. The steroids were so strong they made my head cloudy and made concentration difficult. Writing and driving should have been among the first things I quit doing, unfortunately I commute to school and had my final short story due for my Creative Writing workshop. Miraculously, I avoided having a wreck. My short story on the other hand was humiliatingly horrible. The term train wreck comes to mind.

I attempted to touch upon a delicate and controversial subject and the result was about as subtle as a sledgehammer and came across as both cruel and creepy. Mercifully, my revision of the work has turned it into a story I can honestly say I’m proud of, if for no other reason than it started out as such an atrocious piece of garbage. Still, the entire process was humiliating.

That time I managed to cover myself in poison ivy while weed eating without proper protection. This, my third time, I can only speculate as to how it got on me. By now I am properly paranoid and so when I set out to paint the fences a few days ago I went out covered from head to toe despite the heat. I could not have been anywhere near poison ivy for more than a few moments, more than that, it somehow got on my arm through my long sleeved shirt. My best guess is that I rubbed up against it and was sweating so much that the oils penetrated through the cloth.

My brother-in-law and I were supposed to head out the next morning to go fishing. This is something of a big deal. He’s a straight up Cajun playing football for the NFL and I am a nerd-tastic city slicker adapting to country life while working on my MFA in creative writing. Night and day have more in common than we do without our family and especially my sister. Both of us are making an effort to bridge the gap, and being the understanding guy that he is, he was all for me going to see the doctor first thing in the morning before we headed out.

The poor man was stuck waiting until one o’clock in the afternoon. The first clinic I went to opened at eight o’clock. I filled out all the paper work and waited for over an hour before they called me to the front desk and told me there had been an emergency and they would not be able to see me that day, could I come back on Monday (it was Saturday). I sincerely hope that whoever had the emergency came out of it okay, but waiting that long really wasn’t an option considering how fast this crap spreads on me. The other clinic was down south of Conroe, about forty five minutes to get to. My morning was long and tedious.

But at least I was early enough that I didn’t need a shot this time! So I’m popping steroid pills, spraying Ivarest on my arm (that stuff is the only topical I’ve had any success with—everything else either fails to stop the itching or spreads the oils around), and shopping for a special type of soap that the doctor said will break down the poison ivy oils should I ever get it on me again. My arm’s itched some, but between all of the precautions I’ve taken, the blisters have gone down and haven’t spread. I think I’ve got it contained! I’m even able to write and edit my novels and will be giving a presentation tonight on crafting characters.

As an aside, my brother-in-law and I did manage to go fishing. Over the course of five hours, we caught, or I should say he caught, a single catfish. I blame the kayakers who kept paddling past us. One guy deliberately ran his kayak into one of the prime fishing spots and splashed around with his paddle. And as if to mock us, the fish that stuck around after that mastered the subtle art of stealing the bait from our hooks. The afternoon was just as long and frustrating as the morning in its own way, but holy cow if this place wasn’t gorgeous. There are a heck of a lot worse ways to spend an afternoon than sipping Dr. Pepper with your brother-in-law on the side of a lake while trying to catch some fish.

I’ll be countrified yet.