Poison Ivy is called that for a reason

Well, that previous picture of Aedyn is actually pretty old. I think about 3 weeks old. It was before we went back to IL for graduation. Hopefully Heidi will post some new pics of him soon (she's better at the stories that go with them). My goal is to try to catch you up on what has happened since we first moved here. Over the next couple of days. That first Aedyn pic was before he even knew how to use his abdominal muscles to assist me in leaning him forward. He is so smart!

On the note of catching you all up, some of you who saw me when we returned noticed that my skin was not all the nice pallor it usually is. No, that wasn't d/t the fact that I had been working like a horse outside around our house for the previous two weeks (although I had been). It goes like this: When I was growing up, there was plenty of poison ivy around us. Lots down by the lake and I'm sure there was some in the ravine across the street from our home. But I never reacted to it. None of the four of us children who lived there did. We probably rolled in it, but it caused us no harm. So I grew up blissfully naïve about its dangers and only dimly aware of the adage: "leaves of three, let it be." A botanist by nature, though, I was technically cognizant of what it looked like and sometimes identified it as the low-growing ground cover at my feet--just never worried about it. Incidentally, it's about 1 in 4 of the population who at a given time is also not reactive to it.

So, working in the yard soon after we arrived I came in one night with my left arm having this lines of terribly itchy blisters. Could not figure it out. Had a brown recluse spider bite a couple of weeks before and these looked somewhat like that, and we did have lots of spiders in our house . . .

Two days later I set the neighbors tree on fire. I'm not a clutz, but the neighbors tree looks well and alive at first glance, but on closer inspection proves to have some well dead and rotten areas. One of the ashes from our controlled fire must have lit some REALLY dry wood (it's been kinda a drought for this area recently). Next thing I know the neighbor from across the street comes over and asks if I knew the tree was on fire? (I guess that's a less active way of *telling* be the tree is on fire). So we had to climb into the tree with hoses to put it out (which is long and arduous when the wood is rotten on the inside--the fire can travel inside to other parts of the tree!).

"Careful, that tree is full of poison ivy."

"Oh that's all right, I'm not allergic."

Up in the tree one can see that MANY of the leaves are not maple at all--I was swimming in poison ivy wearing shorts and shirt sleeves.

This was the result:



The pics don't capture the oozing and blistering. And I didn't realize how bad it was. It took another neighbor telling me they see it all the time and mine looked the worse case ever, 'here, let me get a course of steroids from a friend who has a stash for just this purpose.' It took TWO course of steroids to get rid of it.



The morals: (1) your immune system changes over time, so you may react to something in the future you don't react to now, or haven't in the past. (2) Poison ivy in the south is not like it is in the midwest—in the south it actually acts like an ivy and climbs over trees of incredible height.