Poison Ivy OR Don't be Afraid to Shake my Hand, Tch, tch, tch
Categories: Home & Gardening , Health & Nutrition
About 25 years ago, my mates and I were drinking 9-cents-a-bottle wine (probably now about 78-cents-a-bottle wine) in the Avignon train station, waiting for the 3 a.m. billet bige train to Italy. A man with a bleeding hand approached us. He spoke no French nor any other recognizable language; just "Tch, tch, tch," as he pointed first to our individual bottles of wine and then to his dripping hand. My classmates scattered, but I caught on and poured a few cups of the cheap wine on his hand. He said, "Tch, tch, tch," and went to a different part of the station.
The paragraph above provides one piece of useful advice, which is that alcohol is a good thing to pour on a wound, or on a potential wound. Rubbing alcohol is best, but you can't count on everyone you meet in a train station at 1 a.m. having rubbing alcohol.
It's hard to write a whole book about poison ivy, because there are basically just two rules about how to treat it in its initial stages, but Outwitting Poison Ivy, by Susan Carol Hauser, who also wrote Outwitting Ticks, makes the subject as lively as possible.
First, within 5-10 minutes after contact, slosh a rubbing-alcohol-saturated cloth around on your skin. A Handi-Wipe won't have enough alcohol on it, and don't scrub your skin aggressively, because abrasion could make the urushiol oil bond all the more intensely with your body parts. Then take a shower with a "copious" amount of water. Don't make the water too hot, because hot water makes your pores expand and more likely to suck in the urushiol oil. Probably even cold water won't help, though. It doesn't matter whether you use soap or not. If you have poison ivy in your yard, there is no environmentally friendly way to remove it.
If you've gotten to it too late--three or four hours is the outside window--palliative care is all you can hope for. I recommend a spray-on product made by Johnson & Johnson, which is better than anything I tried the last time I had an encounter. Saying "I'm not allergic to poison ivy" is like saying, "I think I'll just go stick my finger into this electric socket."
What makes the book fun rather than merely useful is the inclusion of historical and folk remedies (laundry soap, urine, carbolic acid, etc.) and the knowledge that equally nasty poisonous plants in China and Japan are often used to make lacquer, so you can become infected not only by touching the plant but also by touching furniture coated with the vile toxin.
My other advice would be that unless the cheap ticket is more than 50 percent cheaper than a normal ticket, it's not a great idea to begin your Italian vacation at 3 a.m. in the Avignon train station. If you do, though, you can probably get away with sitting in the First-Class Waiting Room rather than the slightly more depressing Second-Class one. It's worth a try.
