So, I have poison ivy. AGAIN.
If anyone is keeping track, that brings my count to, I think, five times this in the last few months. Given that it usually takes a few weeks to go away, that means I’ve basically had poison ivy to some degree ALL SUMMER.
Last night, as Jeremiah and I were winding down from our exceedingly exciting anniversary (Recap: We drove five hours to Columbia, MO. He put shoes on three horses while I watched him put shoes on three horses. We drove five hours home.), I was complaining about wanting to scratch my skin off. Anything that I knew had the potential to make the itching feel better (anti-itch cream, etc) was, you guessed it, at the ranch. Driving there to pick up such items wasn’t really an option, nor was high-tailing it to the local Walgreens. (Because it was late, and I was lazy.)
Instead, I did what any good millennial will do when in need of solutions to a problem.
I Googled it. (WordPress, by the way is flagging “Googled” as misspelled. At first I thought it was just jealous of Google’s success, until it flagged “WordPress” too…)
Turns out, Google’s first impulse is to assume that I’m trying to make poison. (To what ends, Google apparently does not judge.) It’s second impulse is to assume I’m a medieval sorcerer in search of potion making tips and tricks. (You have to go with sorcerer, by the way, because witch is just loaded with gender biased connotations. You probably don’t have to assume it’s medieval, but I did because I like the word medieval.) It is not until Google’s third impulse that we get anywhere near where we need to be.
You know what this means, don’t you? It means that there are more people out there searching for ways to make poison…or, erm, poison potions…than there are innocent people like me who just want to make poison ivy go away.
And, incidentally, Google still got it wrong because I wanted to search for “how to make poison ivy stop itching.”
Once I got passed my initial searching, which took a while because of the running commentary I was providing for my husband who really trying hard to get some legal documents filed with legal zoom, I finally found a fairly useful article on WebMD.
And by fairly useful, I mean that it provided quality information without suggesting that my poison ivy might be cancer.
I had been expecting all of the websites to recommend hydrocortisone cream or something, which I did not have. Instead, though, WebMD offered up some really basic suggestions. There were a bunch of things on this really long list, but I only read the first three:
1. Ice it.
2. Use a baking soda paste on the affected area.
3. Use watered down vinegar.
Now, these suggestions are all meant to be used individually, but, being the overachiever that I am, I decided to try all of them at once.
Go back and read that list again. Do you have it yet?
Yeah…I basically made up a batch of the contents of a third grader’s volcano science project, put it on a paper towel, and then threw an ice pack over the top of it. (By the way, overachievers don’t water down the vinegar…or the baking soda…because that would just be silly.)
Know what? Totally worked.
I’m not even kidding. Within about 10 minutes, the poison ivy rash that had been tormenting me all day stopped itching. And the itching hasn’t come back. Because science.
Now, if only I could come up with a delivery method that INCLUDED the 3rd grade volcano, this would perhaps be the best discovery ever.
Almost Farmgirl 