Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Attack of the Killer Poison Ivy

It should be no surprise to those who knew me growing up, but I am deathly afraid of plants whose name includes "poison." For me, the two most notorious have been poison ivy and poison sumac. At one point, when I was eleven-years-old, I turned into Rocky Dennis. Scary, right?

So when I found some suspicious bumps on Louie Sunday I had no doubt what devious oils had made their way onto my firstborn's skin. We applied calamine lotion and gave him some medicine with an antihistamine. There is this substance called Calagel that we found at CVS and does a really good job of drying it out, and as a bonus it's not pink. As good as that stuff works, I decided to take him in to see Dr. J so she could give some advice because me telling Lou to "Stop scratching" wasn't enough of a preventive measure to keep it from taking over his body.

Apparently she has seen a ton of poison ivy cases recently and many of them were infected (Lou's wasn't), and she thought what we've been doing is fine, but also gave us a prescription for hydrocortisone 2.5%. Now, in my mind I thought that running into Walgreen's would be really quick and easy because it's in a tube and they could just hand it to me. We must have run into the clerk on a really bad day because not only was she grumpy but she made a mom of three small children wait for 15 minutes in a store that is filled to the ceiling with trinkets that small children love. We headed down to Bruegger's.

Ben has a bit of poison ivy on his arm and I have some on my neck (although I could be imagining things), Kevin has some on his hand, and luckily Charlie has been passed over thus far by the devilish poison ivy. We will survive.

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