Easily among the worst weeks of my life. Top three. I enumerated and renounced my sins, I wept, I watched so much goddamn television. I wrapped myself in a sheet and wished to die and start over. I rubbed with fingertips and washcloths, a sad substitute for scratching, until I developed deep bruises under the rash. I thought about all the people I can't stand on this earth and tried to think of one I'd want to experience a ninth of what this felt like, and came up with nobody. I shuffled my six medicines so the side effects of one would not destroy me; I swung from aches to fever to nearly-constant nausea. More than once I ate half a cracker and gave up. I saw dawn after dawn.
You'd never guess from my horrifying wrists and back that I feel relieved today. This is nowhere near done with. But the itch is quieter and doesn't spike every ten minutes. I'm not frantic and I don't feel like I'm going mad. There's even a chance I might go outside, which has not been an option for a week. And I received the unfamiliar blessing of a full night's sleep.
I maintain that there was something fucked-up going on with the mosquito bites but it seems the greater problem was plain old poison ivy. This is tantamount to the time I went around for weeks complaining about my achy head until somebody said, It's called sinuses, dipshit. Oh.
Any rational person would have said, I worked in the yard today, now I have blisters on everything I touched, I must have poison ivy. It didn't occur to me because I've been immune my whole life, until now. Ta daa.
Anyway I am here to report on a folk remedy which works like a mofo. I don’t know if this is effective only for poison ivy / oak, or any sort of want-to-carve-your-skin-off intense itching. If you are in a situation where you will try anything, this is worth a try.
Run warm water over the affected nasty nasty areas. Stay in the stream of water until you're sort of used to it, then hotten it by tiny increments until it is literally as hot as you can stand. I am not responsible for anyone burning himself on the itch. Let's say you progress gradually through ten steps of hotness - step nine will reawaken the itch like you never dreamed possible. But step ten will cure it for hours. No grody creams that will fuck you up in different ways. I can't believe this folk remedy works but as it turns out, the folk are right on.
