One Itch For Another

He’d gotten poison ivy during the pandemic of 2020. He’d always been especially sensitive to poison ivy ever since he and his younger brother got it as kids, leafing around for baseballs at a new-to-them practice spot. They both had to see a doctor because of their inability to stop scratching and because it spread to their face, near their mouths. Then again in his thirties, just cleaning up the yard of the tiny apartment he rented, he’d touched just enough to have it spread like a wildfire over his body to the point where the “physician” at the urgent care gasped not so conspicuously at this sight of his back. He missed a wedding and had to have a steroid treatment Mark McGwire would have been proud of. Ever since then he’d taken great care to be covered head to toe whenever he knew he would be venturing beyond a lawn. He was covered head to toe, including gloves and hat, when he walked through the woods of Goddard park in Rhode Island, as the Corona Virus pandemic was sweeping the globe. Still, the ivy found him, somehow someway. Whenever his pants lifted oh so slightly, it would reach out and swipe at his ankles, straining for the slightest touch of a hair or a tap tap of the lateral malleolus. It wanted to strangle his ankles but all it could do was reach, reeeaaacccch for a chance to poison him in the nanosecond when his skin was vulnerable. Vulnerable he was; and despite a shower upon return, in the morning—had he scratched himself in his sleep—he was covered with the will-crushing itchy oil. Not the best time to have to see a doctor, when the world is swept up in a pandemic, the proportions of which have shut down both the biggest city and the biggest economy in the world. As makeshift hospitals are being built in abandoned parking lots by the National Guard, car companies are shutting down production to make ventilators to help people survive, and every health professional from here to the tropics has to wear a hazmat suit 24/7, this guy is going to go to the hospital for poison ivy?

Yep.

Who has two thumbs and can’t take a shower because the itch nearly drains him of his will to live? 

Yep.

Off to his doctor he went. And just like last time, the doctor almost passed out when he took off his shirt. Covered in red bumps and purplish slashes of skin that made it look like he’d been burned or sliced with venom. Streaks and bruises and welts deformed his skin, making him hideous to take in, even for a moment. None of that mattered to him; he gave no thought to how he looked, not one. The itch burned him up so much he wanted to die to be rid of it. He nearly did. The doctor prescribed the toughest ointment made and he got a 55 gallon drum of it and was covered in mere hours. He’d also gotten another dose of steroids to speed the healing. It did nothing. Just the next morning, he suffered with an itch so strong it made him contemplate a life without skin. Corona virus meant nothing to him, nothing. The itch owned him and drove him to the emergency room before six a.m. The intake person gaped at him, the spread now up through the collar of a loose shirt, climbing his chin, reaching for his ears, like a red skinfire driving up his body. He was admitted for poison ivy during a pandemic. Let that sink in. He didn’t have cancer, a broken bone, his carotid artery wasn’t cut, he hadn’t been shot, he itched. But he wore the mask and he could see the look of horror in their eyes as they fumbled to try to help him without touching him. A pandemic known for its social distancing doesn’t help a guy with poison ivy lesions covering his body like some fucked up tattoo. What could they do though? More ointment? More steroids? This shit was swallowing him, gulping him down starting at his ankles and shoving him down the poison ivy gullet, itch by itch. He was in tears when the last doctor looked at him, before they decided to induce a coma. The logic being, you can’t itch when you’re in a coma and if you can’t itch, you can’t spread it and more importantly, you can’t suffer. And he was suffering. Anyone telling you the itch from poison ivy isn’t suffering can rot in hell. He was in hell as that itch tore at him and his mind. Nothing else mattered. Who goes to the emergency room during the pandemic of the twenty-first century, if they aren’t suffering. But as the medically induced coma took hold, the itch faded away, like wisps of clouds that dissipate to blue sky, along with his consciousness.

Here’s the rub about being in a medically induced coma during the pandemic of the twenty-first century: you aren’t exactly priority number one, or one thousand. So when he came to, two months later, he was itch free but now suffered from kettle drum pangs of hunger punching through his stomach. He didn’t even know he was down to one hundred and twenty five pounds, from his usual one seventy five. Technology meant no bed sores but it would have been little in comparison to his hunger pain.
“Eat this,” a female voice told him, a white tube like a garter snake now dangling in front of his face. Hearing the word eat was music to his ears but when he tried to lift his arm, it was as if free will had left him—asked him, “Where’s my money Jack?—because it wouldn’t go. When he looked down at it, as if looking at it would make it work, it just nervous-shook a little. His other arm did the same thing. Before he could say I can’t, the tube top was ripped off and the sweet liquid/yogurt was in his mouth and the pleasure of food and nutrition dropped his weak arms to the bed as tears pebbled from his eyes. “You’ll have to be brought along slowly,” the female voice told him. He knew the voice was female but what he saw in his hazy periphery was something like an industrial, futuristic hazmat suit and an even more futuristic head wrap with mirrored goggles hovering over him, reflecting his wan self. When the tube was emptied and the feeling of nutrition spreading from within, she said, “I’ll come back.” He followed the figure with his eyes as she moved back to step on something and lower the bed. A gentle whirring noise filed from underneath as the beige ceiling began to roll into view. The legs of the hazmat suit scraped together and heavy boots clopped the floor and she was gone. It was the beige ceiling and sounds. It was a date. But the heavy petting only started when he realized that he was not in a hazmat suit and he was not in some futuristic bubble-wrapped hospital room with bells and whistles and beeps beeping and monitors monitoring, free from whatever virus it was that was churning up deaths when he was induced. The what-ifs began to split, like cells, from one to two and two to four...and fuuuuuck, he’d traded one itch for another.