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Yesterday I did some heavy digging & chopping around the base of an oak tree & got into poison ivy roots. This afternoon I discovered a blister on my forearm & then proceeded to locate the Calamine Lotion I knew I had but haven't used in years.
The expiration date was 7/98 & it had dried out & rattled when I shook the bottle. I added a little hot water, let it sit for a while then shook it up & applied it to my arm. Lo & behold, it still works!
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You're gonna need an ocean
Of Calamine lotion
You'll be scrachin' like a hound
The minute you start to mess around
With poison ivy
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Jewelweed. Works like a charm on Ohio poison ivy. Even grows in the same place.
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Hopefully you have washed all the poison ivy "juice" off your skin first...
Or you will start spreading it!
Good old fashioned soap, and a not-hot shower... systematic scrubbing of every square inch.. .and twice where you REALLY don't want the rash. Repeat three times over 3-4 hours.
OR use something like Tec-Nu Poison Oak and Ivy cleanser... And in the future, use Tec-Nu Poison Oak and Ivy Armor to keep from getting exposed in the first place.
The stuff works like MAGIC.
Some friends and I expose ourselves every year to huge quantities of Poison Oak up at a friends cabin. Not intentionally, but pretty much ALL the green undergrowth IS poison oak around there.
We're pretty sure by the smell and texture that the Tec-Nu cleanser (which is VERY effective if you use it within an hour of exposure) is either all, or mostly, mineral spirits.
We had it so bad one year that we were all quite close to just burning all our belongings, along with the cabin, and driving naked directly to a hazmat equiped hospital...
After that trip, we became experts at three things;
Recognising Poison Oak.
Cleaning and treating poison oak "wounds" and
Exterminating that satanic weed with everything handy.
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I will have nightmares tonight Paul, thanks, thanks a lot.
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Try this nightmare;
Clearing brush on the far side of a nice river swimming hole for a rope swing to while away the 100 degree summer afternoons...
And realizing as you're yanking bushes out of the ground with bare hands... wiping the sweat away...
And pushing the shrubbery down the river... as an odd little oil slick surrounds your body...
And then we all realized that those "bushes" were POISON OAK!
By this time, it was far too late...
The horror of the next two weeks of swollen pus filled agony left me a changed man...
I want that species of plant exterminated from this earth.
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I saw Paul's YouTube videos of the horror.
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Fels Naptha soap for washing it off.
