Itchy, hood, bear.

After we got home from Long Island at 4 pm on Thursday, I went immediately to urgent care. This has been a terrible summer skin-wise. My 2nd bout of poison ivy was held in check during my 12 day course of steroids, but it wasn’t completely gone by the time I had tapered off about a week ago. I just assumed that it would clear slowly now that it wasn’t very bad. But instead, it seemed to take its time to go away and at the same time morph into little red dots all over my body which were like 40x itchier than the actual poison ivy itself. I was pretty miserable on the ride home from Long Island and when I headed into urgent care, the doc took one look at me and said – I’ll give you a third course of steroids, but you can’t take any more after this and you need to see a dermatologist. And whatever you do don’t scratch. And I realized he was right, all the raised, angry areas were due to my scratching. The actual itchy parts were tiny little pustules randomly all over my body. (I did momentarily think that I got bitten by bed bugs, but the itchiness was the worst closest to the poison ivy and radiated out from there all the way to my back, abdomen, groin and upper legs, nothing on my ankles or lower legs which were the only uncovered parts while I was sleeping.) He, depressingly, told me that the steroids probably wouldn’t clear it and it could last for months and it needed more targeted care. Jeremy has a dermatologist that he likes, but she schedules appointments two months out and I completely was beside myself thinking that I would be so itchy for months and months. And it’s true, the steroids do not do anything to this secondary reaction and on Friday and Saturday – Jeremy asked me, so what’s your plan today? And I said, I plan to concentrate my efforts on not scratching. And I did accomplish this – I didn’t scratch for two days even though I was out of my mind with itchiness. I took baths, Benadryl, the useless steroids, I bought all the different anti-itch creams from CVS and slathered away. I even read articles about turning my scratching hand into my healing hand and concentrating healing vibes into my hands and then rubbing it on my itchy areas instead of scratching. Gah, such woo woo crap. But whatever, I did what I could. But I think I can say finally this morning, all the raise streaks of itchiness hell are subsiding today. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still itchy, just like 40% less itchy than yesterday. OMG. My poor body, so confused and overreacting. I’m like – please chill out, I’m ok. totally ok, you don’t need to send the army of histamines willy nilly all over.

I’ll write a few more little stories from our trip to Long Island. So, because I wanted to keep the trip affordable and funny, I did book this RV on airbnb and it was perfect, funny and cheap and totally fine – it has hundreds of happy reviewers on the website and I left a five-star review as well. And it was like 10 minutes from everything we wanted to see. Anyways, towards the end of the visit at the fire department (which was happy and lasted like an hour), one of the firemen asked us where we were staying. And I mentioned that we were staying in an RV in Brentwood. And then he kind of turned his head and said – oh, you are staying in the hood. And then Megan asked, what is your definition of “hood”? Clearly, we have different definitions of being in the hood. We’ve been laughing at this for days now.

Megan is also very well trained in claw prize machines. She studies youtube videos about this craft and I watched her win this teddy bear. You usually can’t win with only one try because you need the first try to gather information about the machine and the objects in the bin. And you can’t decide what you want and go for it, you have to figure out which one is possible to grab and then tailor your attempts towards that. This bear cost $15 worth of tries. I was impressed.