Rebuild from Depression Blog

I'm on the road to recovery. Thank you all for your suggestions. They have helped me survive the last week. If I did not continue to re-infect myself, I would probably be free of the rashes about now. I expect I have another week. As I continue to scratch, I thought I'd reflect on what I learned.

1. You might be tiny and you may have lost all of your leaves, but dang, you can pack a punch.

In the winter, poison oak looks like a red stick.

That's it. It's dormant and has no leaves.

You might never notice it at all if it were not for the rashes it leaves all over your body.

I went out the other day to look for my nemesis. It was no where to be seen. You hear stories of people coming down with poison oak with no known contact: mowing a lawn in the city. It makes no sense frankly and, in my case, I expect I got it on the north side of the hill on the day I wore shorts, a t-shirt, and scratched myself up something fierce on a bunch of brush.

The day after my last campaign the tiny spot appeared and I announced naively:

"One spot. I got lucky."

A week later I was at a meeting in Sacramento looking like a burn victim. My face had only a spot or two - more acne looking than second-degree-burn looking. I'm sure people thought that I was lucky my face was spared in the fire.

Spots continued to pop up for a week. Luckily, I was the only one "working" who was affected.

Watch out for little red sticks. And in the summer, their leaves are a very bad choice in hiker's toilet paper.

2. Pay attention to basic sanitation

I posted here on the blog about my poison oak problem and I realized that my own "lifestyle practices" were contributing to my problem. You see, the washing machine has been broken for about six weeks. In fact, you might have noticed that fact in my first rugged mountain woman post ("I stared at the overflowing washing machine").

So for various reasons, my stack of clean clothes is pretty small these days. To make matters worse, Sander decided he could "trick" the washer into working and washed a couple of loads of clothes. Sander's "trick" happened the day after I met my nemesis. All of those work clothes got swished around in soapy water. None of the clothes were clean.

"Heck, let's wear them anyway."

That's not always the best decision.

Every day a new itchy spot appeared until I made a fieldtrip to the Laundromat. We were away from home for four days and no new spots appeared. When we returned home I intended to change the sheets as well. Of course, I was too tired and decided it would be obsessive to change those sheets in my exhausted state.

Scratch scratch.

I've changed the sheets.

3. Even rugged women need to shop

I just don't picture "rugged" and "shopping" together. And in general, I don't like to picture "shopping" at all, for anything. Unless it's an antique, I am not interested in shopping for it.

But the whole clothes shopping issue sure can reach a crisis state when all of your clothes are infected with poison oak. I hauled all of the clothes to the Laundromat but had nothing to wear that wasn't potentially infected.

It reminded me of a story back in the 1970s from my hometown of Delano. Right across the street from the tiny Kern County Branch Library in Delano was a coin-operated Laundromat. One night a man was arrested at 3 am for indecent exposure. They found him naked in the Laundromat.

His defense? He had no change of clothes and wanted to wash them.

I thought about that as an option, but it was the middle of the day in a town about ten times the size of Delano in those days. And I don't know if I would have been arrested for indecent exposure or hauled off to the hospital as a burn victim because of the burn-like rashes.

I need a few more pieces of clothing.

4. Frugality is great, a good washing machine is better

Before this winter of washing machine problems, it has been a while since we've used a Laundromat. They have these great new inventions called "front loaders." The front window gives you a view of all of the dirt in your wash water.

I could not believe the difference in the clothes. They didn't seem dingy, not before Sander's experiment anyway. But apparently they were.

"Mom, we are getting a new washing machine. The old one hasn't worked well for a while."

"It's been so long since I've been able to use it, I don't remember how it worked. I'll take your word for it," Mom said.

So we're on the look-out for a scratch-and-dent washer. I'm probably still too cheap for a front-loader, but we'll see what we find.

5. It's what's under the rash that counts

A few days ago I was scratching around and thought,

"Dang, a muscle!"

I have inherited a whole lot of things from my parents - good, bad, everything in between. The one I am focusing on these days is the muscle. My mom is pretty solid, but my dad is in a league of his own. He was recruited into high school football when the coach saw him do 200 sit-ups in high school P.E. class. He stopped at 200 out of embarrassment. He had worked in the potato fields (and every other place my grandpa could find work) from the time he was about ten. Sit ups in P.E. class were nothing for him. But I digress.

If you look at me now, in a coffee house, with the rashes on my arms and what a polite personal trainer would call my "stored energy" covering the muscles, you probably would not notice that the muscles are well on their way. Thanks, Dad.

~~~~~

So, it's all good. The rash is on the way out. The homeopathic remedy, calendula cream, and oatmeal recommended in the previous post have made a big difference. I still wake in the middle of the night with a powerful itch, but I'll be catching up on sleep soon and might even be able to write a real research article for the website very soon. I can always hope. :)