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Spring seemed to come very early this year and with it the emergence of the perennial poison ivy. As regular readers know, I have shared my experiences with poison ivy in blogs for the past several years “as a service to humanity.”
Okay, busted… virtue signaling admitted. But I truly do care about you and wish you to experience health, as even the apostle John did for his readers.
3 John 1:2 Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.
First, I learned from friends about a natural cure for a breakout of the dreaded irritant. Here’s that story from October 7, 2020, entitled “What I did for poison ivy: God thought of everything! (Duh!)”
Then, another friend showed me how I could build my body’s own immune system so that I might never suffer another breakout. I detailed that in my blog dated May 18, 2021. It was entitled “For Sunday brunch I had a poison ivy sandwich—true story! Or…How I licked poison ivy!” I began with just a tiny piece of the leaf on my first experience of eating it.
Then, last year on June 3, 2022 I posted a blog entitled “Poison Ivy Pizza and other adventures.” A couple weeks ago, when I saw the fresh green leaves of the plant I had once considered a wicked weed, I immediately reached down and with a bare hand plucked a stem with three leaves on it.
The fluid oozed from the stem onto my skin. I did not panic. Rather, I was calm and confident that I had already achieved immunity from previous years’ ingestions of the lovely plant.
I took the prize into the kitchen and ran some cold tap water over my skin while laying the leaves on the food prep counter. Retrieving my leftover pizza from the night before, I warmed it up.
When it came out of the oven I carefully snipped some fresh basil (which are the leaves on the right side in the photo) and then snipped off two whole leaves of poison ivy off the stem.
They are the two on the far left in the photo. Yum, yum! It has now been over two weeks since my latest “proof of concept” was a delicious success. Not that the poison ivy has a delicious taste—I could not discern it among all the other goodies with which I had “decorated” my pie.
But it was a delicious delight to eat the pizza and I had absolutely no symptoms from ingesting the leaves of the vigorous ivy vine. Reporting the good news from the mountains of Western North Carolina, I leave you with this:
DISCLAIMER: I am not a medical doctor and therefore I cannot and do not diagnose diseases or prescribe medicine. If you have a medical condition, by all means, consult with a physician. The narrative above is simply a story of my own personal experiences and is not meant as medical advice since everyone’s body is different. What worked for me may not have the same effect for you. We disclaim all liability for what you do with the above information.
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