Explore Kansas Outdoors: Don’t scratch that itch
My mom was so allergic to poison ivy I still believe to this day she could have caught it by merely looking at the plants. I remember her being hospitalized once with poison ivy so bad on her hand that it resembled raw hamburger. My dad on the other hand could’ve rolled around in the stuff and never known it. One night a few years back I went to change a flat tire on our mobile deer blind which was still in the woods, and found it to be afloat in a sea of the healthiest poison ivy I’d ever seen. I chopped it down all around the tire, wore gloves and was pretty careful as I worked, but three or four days later I had a small patch of rash on one arm, the first time I ever “got” poison ivy.
