there goes my career dreams of lumberjacking

the blisters were not from kettlebelling, no, they were poison-oak re-infection. best i can tell, there was urushiol on my shoes, or leftover in my socks, which ended up all over my feet and my hands.

now, if you search the internets for poison oak rashes, you'll come up with a range of images: people have varying sensitivity and varying reactions to the poison (it is not a histamine reaction, apparently. the mechanism is different between allergies and poison oak, with the poison oak being a far more powerful irritant: cortizone cream is helpless against it). when you come across the image that makes you say, "dear god, that looks awful!" that's what my reaction looks like. if you just think, "ouch, that looks horribly itchy," keep looking. that ain't me.

so i suffered through this for a week without resorting to the medical profession, but the reinfection brought me into the docs office. really, there are only two places on the body where it'd be worse to have poison oak than the feet. when it hurts to walk, that sucks. but aside from that, i wasn't sleeping, and my body was in a constant state of heightened itchyness. this is actually quite fatiguing over time (try it!) as the body struggles to set a new ceiling threshold for receiving pain signals. i can't imagine how bad it must be have a real injury.

anyhow, the doctors threw steroids at me, as they tend to do. i asked the doctor if he sees much PO, and if so, where mine ranks. he said he does, and that mine is about as bad as it gets. lucky me. but not surprised me.

after 2 days of the prednisone, my feet are still quite unhappy but they feel like they're approaching some degree of betterness. that's the nice thing about a "course" of meds: they sort of put a date on when you can expect to be better, unlike waiting for it to "run its course" which could be weeks or months. after 2 days, i can now wear my wedding band (finger was too swollen to get it on this morning) and that's a bonus.

for all the unpleasantness, at least it gave me something to write about, eh?