Oozing Pustules and Mango-Bashing

My wounds were oozing in patches.  Everywhere.  “Weeping” is what they call it, I think, but tears run down your skin much quicker than poison-oak-pus.  So gross.  Oozed until the pus crystalized and dried up, then oozed again.  First my forearm, then my ankles, followed by my calves, and then last night it was on my inner thighs.  This morning it sprung up on my pinky finger, up the back side of one leg, and on my breast.  My breast!  Seriously, who gets poison oak on their breast?  Like, how does that even happen?  Horrifying.

I guess I have been, as of last weekend’s backpacking trip, exposed to enough urushiol oil from poison oak to forever suffer the repercussions.  I’ll add that to the ever-growing list of stuff that I have a reaction to.  That’s what it means to get older.  You start reacting to pain meds and bees, get tummy aches from antibiotics, hives from wine, and pretty soon it takes you an hour to fill out paperwork at the doctor’s office when you just have a cold.  That’s why old people are always talking about their ailments.  By that time, there are so many to talk about!  They learn as they acquire each new one, and they become self-appointed medical experts.  And experts like to talk.

But wait, did you know that poison oak’s active components have been determined to be unsaturated congeners of 3-heptadecylcatechol with up to three double bonds in an unbranched C17 side chain?  Yep.  True.  Looked it up.  Plagiarized most of that sentence straight from Wikipedia.

The surface oil urushiol is also in the skin of MANGOS.  Freakin’  MANGOS.  Which poses a danger to people already sensitized.  I hate mangos.  At a BBQ a few days ago, a girl I didn’t know told me she heard how much I hated mangos.  That I “famously-hated-mangos”.  And she was right.  There has never been anything to like about a mango.  But now there are additional reasons to hate one.

I went to work today feeling pretty uncomfortable.  The girls looked up home remedies on their cell phones.  They poured rubbing alcohol on my pinky finger and slathered my arm in honey, but I drew the line on the let’s-put-burning-hot-water-on-it method.  That didn’t sit right with me.  After the honey slathering I wasn’t as itchy and the girls cheered Success!, but who knows – maybe it was the hydrocortisone cream I applied shortly before the honey.  Plus, then I got honey all over my shirt, so that was kind of a bust.

Too bad poison oak doesn’t have a cool name like its cousin – poison sumac, aka ‘Thunderwood’.  I’ll have to give poison oak a new nickname.  Like ‘Hell-Vine’.  Or ‘Oozing-Pustule-Creeper’.

Anyway, see how much I’ve learned?

Now I’ll fit right in with the Blue-Hairs.  Playin’ Bunko and bashing mangos.  Because now I am an expert…and officially old.