Wife of a Leper

In the spirit of full disclosure (the words of EK), this is a nasty post dealing with such words as pus and blood and oozing and dealing with such things as diarrhea and vomiting.

Hi, my name is Melanie and I am married to a leper.

His skin is blistered and oozing. Big pieces of goo just drop off of him at any given time. Skin mixed with pus and sometimes blood. It's a disgusting sight. I can't, or rather don't, touch him. To touch him means to come away with a sticky shirt and I don't like sticky shirts that have pieces of skin and drops of pus on them. Call me heartless, but I just don't.

He is not an animal.

Okay, so he doesn't have leprosy. It's just poison ivy. But it's bad. He looks as if he has a really bad sunburn on the affected areas. From the sunburned areas come crusty brown mountains of yellow lava that flows and flows...and flows. By the time his clothes come off of his body, or rather, are peeled off his body, they are stiff.

Seriously.

And since children read this blog, let's just assume that 'affected' areas are just arms, stomach, and legs, okay? Because if you are a man and start to think of blistering poison ivy on other 'affected areas', you may really start to feel it...

Remember how excited Jon was to have the chainsaw? Well, in his zeal, he sliced right through the dog's invisible fence AND got into some poison ivy. Now for most of us, we could get into poison ivy and end up with an itchy rash. Not Jon. Ever since I've known him, he has gotten poison ivy often. But about twice a year, he really gets it. Full-blown, keep-you awake-all-night-gritting-your-teeth kind of gets it. One time he got it internally after breathing it from a campfire. That was lovely.

I have known my beloved since January of 1991 and during that time I have known him to miss two days of work due to illness. Oh no, it wasn't after he'd been up all night with a raging fever and liquids coming out of both ends. He went to work after that. It was from poison ivy.

He was working at the steel factory. His uniform consisted of jeans, steel toe boots, two pairs of long socks, and long sleeves. All. Year. Long. In a steel shop. (He could wear short sleeves in the summer, but when he has poison ivy, it puts people in a panic when they see it so he usually tries to wear long sleeves to cover it up a bit) It was June and hot. And he had poison ivy. His legs were covered, top to bottom, in festering, oozing blisters. The blisters would weep onto his jeans and dry, causing his jeans to stick to his legs. Any movement broke them open. The cycle would repeat again and again, all day long. By the time he got home on that particular Wednesday night, he painfully peeled off his work jeans...and they stood up alone.

He took Thursday and Friday off, the poor leper.

We've tried all the remedies and prescription stuff. It helps, but the poison still has to just run it's course. It's painful even just to watch. I hear him now playing guitar downstairs and all I can think about is his arm rising and falling to strum the strings and those blisters being scratched open again...

It's drying up now and should be cleared up in a few days. If not, I'm sending him off to the leper colony. He's leaving too much of a mess here.