Friday, June 27, 2014

Poison Ivy - the Summertime Malady by Denise Devine Meinstad

What exactly is poison ivy? It’s a plant with shiny leaves in clusters of three and it tends to look droopy. Mature plants have pearl-like berries. The entire plant is cover with an oily resin called urushiol that causes the infection. The leaves, especially the new shoots, contain the most toxin. It can remain on clothing, shoes and tools for up to a year! Therefore, you must launder your garden gloves with your gardening clothes every time you use them. It can also be carried in the fur of your pets, so even if you take precautions, you could still contract it.

Do you spend a lot of time in the garden, at your lake cabin, playing softball or taking walks in wooded areas? If so, you’ve probably brushed up against poison ivy and didn’t know it until your skin started burning and itching. And most likely, by that time, you had unknowingly touched other areas on your body and infected them, too! So you rummage through your medicine cabinet for something to relieve the pain, but you can’t find anything.

Now what do you do? You can’t stop the itching until you get to the drugstore, but what if you can’t drop everything and go shopping? Here are some old-fashioned tips using items you might already have in your house:

    • Scrub the area immediately with ‘pumice’ soap, such as Lava. Keep a bar handy in a plastic bag. The soap will clean off any oil on the surface and under your nails so it doesn’t spread. This is important!!
    • Another effective soap that has been around forever is Fels-Naptha. Get it at Wal-Mart.
    • Try cleaning the area with a degreasing hand cleaner, the kind that mechanics use when working on cars. It’s available at any auto parts store.
    • Wet the infected area and rub in table salt.
    • Use an acne cream, like Proactive.
    • Rub the area with bleach. (Some people swear this works!)


After cleansing:
    • Sooth the area with Noxzema.
    • Make a paste of powdered alum and water and spread it on the infection.
    • Don’t cover the blisters with bandages. Allow them to dry out.


As I write this article I am battling with poison ivy between my toes and it has somehow spread to the back of one knee. This time I know where I got it. I was taking pictures of wild roses along a nearby roadside and I saw the plants there, but how it got between my toes is a mystery because I wore tennis shoes. I used the pumice soap and then applied a cream. So far, it’s working well.

Denise Devine has had a passion for books since the second grade when she discovered Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She wrote her first book, a mystery, at age thirteen and has been writing ever since. She's been a member of Romance Writers of America (RWA) since 1991 and has won or placed in numerous writing contests, including RWA’s Golden Heart contest for unpublished writers. Her newest release, This Time Forever, is an inspirational romance and is available at Amazon.

9 comments:

  1. I'm so sorry you've come into contact with this nasty plant, but I'm glad you know what to do about it. I once came into contact with poison oak while visiting relatives in Missouri. I thought I had some terrible skin disease and didn't know what to do. I'm an Arizona girl. I know what to do about sunburn and cactus spines (small, fine ones, pour on white glue, let it dry and peel it off; big ones, get out the pliers), but not a clue about poison oak. I ended up at the doctor's office with my legs covered in the stuff. At least I'll recognize it if I ever come across it again.

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    1. It got better right away and now is almost gone. I used some of my husband's orange Goop hand degreaser to clean out the poison.

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  2. I don't think we get it down here in NZ - maybe we do but its rare. Sounds hideous, anyway. Shudder... I Iove the cover of your book with the gorgeous autumn colours!!

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    1. Thank you very much. Autumn is one of my favorite seasons because of the rich diversity of color.

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  3. Denise, so sorry you have the itch from poison ivy. You are right about getting it from the fur of your pets. I couldn't figure out why I kept getting the rash on my forearms until I connected it to picking up our cats who had been roaming in the woods near our house.

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    1. I used to have horses and there was occasionally poison ivy in their hay. I learned the hard way to always use gloves with no holes in the fingers.

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  4. I hope you're feeling better by now, Denise. I remember the nasty stinging rash well from when I was a kid! Plants are so interesting, aren't they? I haven't been so well lately and as I lay in bed this past week I reread Where The Lilies Bloom -- do any of you remember that one? Those kids "wildcrafting" in the mountains, looking for all sorts of medicinal plants, trying to tell the poisonous ones from the useful ones...

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    1. The funniest story I ever heard was the one Stephen King put in his book about writing. When he was a young boy, he got poison ivy on his butt from going to the bathroom in the woods. Guess what he used for TP?

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  5. This makes me glad we don't have poison ivy in the UK!

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