It was very unpleasant

I got poison ivy on my face.  As my friend asked, “Did you fall [face first] in it?”

Well, nearly.  We had a  lost person search happen locally that eventually lasted days and involved teams from all over the province, but the first night, it was just a half dozen of us in the dark, and we built a fire, in the dark, while waiting for the go-ahead to launch our canoes.  I had just rubbed my eyes, because of the smoke, when one of the guys noticed in the beam of his flashlight that all of us, and the fire we’d just built on hands and knees, were at ease in a giant patch of flourishing poison ivy.

Knowing this, and that I tend to get raging inflammations from a  sideways glance at poison ivy, I did full decontamination and containment protocols nine hours later when we got out of the woods. Too late.

Three days later, three suspicious red bumps on my cheek erupted into the full conflagration, my eyelids swelling alarmingly.

Gross.

Poison ivy sucks.  Open, oozing wounds and blisters, and my whole body was fevered and nauseous for a couple days, and I was extra sensitive to bug bites. It was also on my hands, and back. 

It’s almost over now, two weeks after exposure, and it doesn’t appear  that it will scar.   The very good news is that I avoided secondary infection!  I give the credit to tea tree oil.  I thought it would burn like stink, but it didn’t really, it was a little bit drying, which stalled the super-gross constant oozing, and I’m sure that’s what kept bacterial infection at bay.   I have not been so lucky before, and I’m glad I know now.

I got hydro-cortizone cream after my eyes swelled, but that just…took the itch off a bit.  It was too painful to scratch, so that wasn’t too tempting.

Ew.

Glad it’s over!  But I had a good excuse, not blogging;)