Poison Ivy, Poison Sumac, Poison Oak, and Everything In-between

At least one time in everyone’s life they are afraid to ask a question. Maybe it’s a question about math, or a “can you repeat that?” question. Mine was a health related question, “What are these bug-bite like marks, rash, and why does it itch so bad?” This starts at the very end of the summer, beginning of school. In my backyard, there’s a patio that was overgrown with weeds, roots, and brush. My parents talked about cleaning it up for a while but never got around to give. I figured I would clean it up for them since I had nothing better else to do. I wore a short sleeved t-shirt and shorts, since it was quiet warm outside. I cranked on the weed whacker and got to work. For about 2 hours, I cleaned up all the brush, cut down branches, and pulled up roots. Afterwards, I was so tired I fell asleep, didn’t even shower first. About 2-3 weeks later, I noticed little red dots on my legs that looked like bug bite marks, it itched like it so that’s what I thought it was. I kept my window open at night and I didn’t have a very good screen on it, so it made sense that it was mosquitoes. The next day it got worse. There were more on my legs and it constantly felt like my legs were on fire, I could not stop itching them. I brought it up to a family member and I was told to deal with it. It got worse throughout the day, I kept quiet. The next day it got much much worse. My legs were bright red, more marks, itched worse, and now it had spread to my thighs and arms. I brought it up to that same family member and they told me it was brown tail moth. Since there was a nest above the patio where I was cleaning, some of their fur must have gotten on me. Made sense, that family made something to hopefully help easy the pain.

The next day, I woke up with blisters on my legs. It hurt, I could barely walk. I was so afraid to bring it up with that family member again as they were tired of hearing about it so I kept quiet again. My arms and thighs got worse, and now it was spread to my stomach. A day after this, I was at school and the largest blister popped. I could do nothing but wrap a paper towel around it and wait until school ended. My friend brought me to the store to buy gauze to wrap my legs in. I wrapped my legs and my father asked me to come outside with him to help with our farm animals. He told me that he was sorry I was dealing with the brown tail moth rash and he felt bad. I told him it was getting worse and he asked how. I lifted up my shirt to show him my stomach, which has gotten worse over the 6 hour period of me being at school. I was so scared that he would brush it off and I would have to continue being in this burning hell amount of pain. His eyes widened and he told me to get in the car and that we were going to urgent care. I almost didn’t believe him at first but 5 minutes later we were on our way. The nurses couldn’t believe the state I was in and told me if I didn’t come in when I did, I would be on my way to the ER in a few short days. I told the nurse that it was a brown tail moth and she said that it wasn’t possible for a brown tail moth to do this much damage. We found out it was most likely poison ivy. Since I was wearing shorts while using a weed whacker, I had no protection from the poison ivy hitting my legs and getting under my skin. My legs were so swollen to the point they thought my liver was failing so I had to get blood drawn. After some more inspection by the doctor, they had to clean my legs up. Worse pain I’ve felt to date. After that, they wrapped my legs up, gave me care instructions, prescribed me a very strong antibiotic and steroids. When I came home I had a breakdown, after being ignored for so long I had finally gotten heard and gotten the help I really needed. After asking so many times for help, I gave up because it just made that person annoyed and made me think it really wasn’t that bad. I still suffer with the after effects of this, contact dermatitis, major hyper pigmentation on my legs, and scarring.

“Young red poison ivy leaves” by Martin LaBar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.