Poison Ivy.

Goddamn. I HATE poison ivy. For those of you who are unaware, I am terribly, horribly, deathly allergic to poison ivy. I have had sensitive skin my entire life, I mean, literally, I will break out in hives if I use the wrong type of bath soap. Yeah, you read it right, bath soap. And you thought you had it bad. I get hives basically weekly, not to mention rashes, sunburn, and itchy scratchy ooh I got one on my backey like every fucking day. But poison ivy gets the ticket. I have gotten it almost consecutively every summer since I was maybe eight or so. The past five summers have been living hell, culminating in summer 2009 where I had such a bad case of poison ivy that the boils were about 2 or three centimeters long, wide, and thick encircling my 1/3rd of my right arm across the entire elbow joint.


AKA it was fucking nasty.


Not to mention the fact that it took about eight or ten weeks for the poison ivy rash to disappear. Single worst experience of my life (and I've had a TON of those). Single most painful experience of my life. It didn't just itch like hellfire. No, when you get it as bas as I do it feels like the poison ivy is stabbing and weaving it's cripplingly itchy tendrils into the very meat of your muscle fibers. Just excruciating pain. And there isn't a damned thing you can do about it. Because my skin is so sensitive, topical cremes are a last resort and for some strange reason steroids only make the swelling worse (they're suppose to rapidly suppress the body's reaction to the poison ivy). So basically, the only thing that can heal the painful boils is time. A lot of time.

This year, fortune shined upon me. For about three days. My sister actually contracted the nasty rash all over her left wrist and right elbow. And of course the girl's got no restraint so the skin is rubbed raw and the rash is a blinding red/purple/blue. I'm not a dermatologist, but I'm pretty sure that's not good. At any rate, I was so morbidly excited by her misfortune because I figured I had slighted fate and escaped my dreadful curse for a summer. Finally broken the five summers from hell.

Nope.

For about three years, and actually most of the time that I contract poison ivy, I get it on my arms (my right arm in particular...I still have major scarring from las summer). Sometimes the legs. One time my stomach. But never, ever, have I gotten it on my neck. Until now.

Seriously!?! Why me?

It is possibly the worst place I can imagine to have poison ivy. Especially for someone like me. So far it's just three disgustingly itchy patches no more than a half a centimeter in diameter, but I am terrified that this is going to develop into massive boils like the past few summers and what I'm more petrified for is that my larynx and trachea and pharynx will swell shut because I tend to have a lot of redness and swelling associated with my poison ivy. Basically, I don't really feel like dying, but thanks universe. This my friends, is what you get for being frank with yourself and admitting that you are glad of the misfortune which has befallen a loved one. Ugh.