A Scriptural and cautionary tale of sheep, goats and donkeys
I owe my readers an apology. As long-time readers know, beginning in October 2020, I began sharing my experiences dealing with poison ivy. Here is the first one.
Here is the link which will bring up all five of my blogs since then. These will provide the good news of how to gain immunity from poison ivy.
In those “annual report” blogs, I shared how as a child growing up on an Ohio farm I had been immune to the noxious weed, but in my 40’s in North Carolina, I discovered I was no longer immune. A very miserable experience proved that.
In the course of these past six years, I learned first of all how to make a tea from the branches of a sycamore tree. It was like a miraculous cure; relief within hours and completely gone in less than 24 hours!
Sometime later, my “mountain man” friend, Billy M., showed me how his grandfather had taught him how to gain natural immunity from it. At my house one day, he reached down and plucked a leaf with his bare hand and ate it!
I remember him telling me that if I ate just one leaf at the beginning of the season each year, I would get immunity and be able to bare hand it like he did.
So, in my first adventure in eating it, I used a small portion of a leaf—about the size of my pinkie fingernail. I remember asking Billy if I should eat a second dose. He said you could, but it would probably be best to wait 48 hours before eating any more, just to see how your body reacts (or does not react) to the first ingestion.
So each year from 2020 until now I have gone out and plucked poison ivy and showed the pictures in my blogs of how I have eaten poison ivy pizza, poison ivy burrito, poison ivy hamburger, poison ivy omelet, etc. It actually has no discernible taste to my buds.
On May 18th, I could no longer find any in my yard so I walked around my neighborhood and plucked this “leaves of three” and brought it home. Here it is on my unprepared tortilla.
Then I fixed my chili-on-tortilla supper and laid one of the leaves on the top after the burrito had cooled a bit from the oven.
As I was waiting for it to cool, I decided some cheesy chips sounded good, so I sprinkled some cheese on the chips and heated them also. Once they were out of the oven and cooling, I decided I would put another leaf on them—I mean, why not? I’m immune, right? Big mistake!
From plucking it to laying it on the food, it was all bare handed. If I were not still immune at that point, I would have broken out in a rash within 15 to 30 minutes.
No problem; the food was tasty, but to repeat, I could not taste the ivy. I just chewed it up and down it went into the central processing unit of my body.
The next day, I decided to make a hamburger for brunch. I still had one leaf of ivy left in refrigerator so I laid it over the top of the burger and ate it. However, that was only about 18 hours after I had eaten the first two of these good-sized leaves of ivy. Uh-oh! Double big mistake!
I had no indigestion or any other symptoms to indicate that something was not right.
It was not until three days later that I started to itch and break out in a rash. The first sign was that my cheeks turned dark red, but did not itch (thank God!). But soon, I began to itch on my jawline and chin.
From there it spread quickly to my neck, chest and shoulders; then to my wrists, forearms, upper arms, torso, legs—within days it had broken out everywhere except my back and feet!
Along with the patriarch Job-level itching (Job 2:7,8), I was also experiencing the chills, shivering in a 78-degree room. I knew it was my body’s histamine response feeding into a cytokine storm inflaming many parts of my body.
I know now that by that point in time it was systemic in my blood, but I was not worried and believed that I knew what to do. I remembered that I had stored some sycamore branches/twigs from when I had made the tea in 2020. I made a three-quart batch and drank it all in the several hours before I went to bed. But it had no effect. Presumably, the wood had lost its potency in the intervening years.
Hurricane Hellene had destroyed the beautiful sycamore tree that had low branches coming down on both my and my neighbors’ property. So, over the next three evenings, I walked all around the neighborhood searching for a sycamore tree. I found three but all of them were so tall that one would need a 30-foot extension ladder just to reach the lowest branch—wholly impractical.
Meanwhile, from the day the symptoms appeared, I could not sleep. I was so very tired and exhausted, but the itching and shivering keeping me awake was driving me “bat crap crazy!” I was trying every natural remedy I could think of. Here’s a list of the things I tried:
Young Living Essential Oils including peppermint, lavender, copaiba, melaleuca, tea tree, & others
Ivermectin
L-lysine and other supplements.
Raw garlic, Ivy Itch ReLeaf spray (with jewel weed and plantain)
Bentonite clay (externally and internally)
Tart red cherry juice and Turmeric Curcumin (both anti-inflammatory), Zeolite and activated charcoal to adsorb and remove toxins.
Colloidal silver internally and externally rubbed on location; brought some temporary relief from the itch.
H2O2 (3% hydrogen peroxide) sprayed externally, some relief.
Udderly Smooth cream from Tractor Supply; some relief.
Aloe gel externally and internally.
Coconut oil, slathered generously over all affected areas of skin – best relief, but only lasted about three hours and had to wear long underwear and cotton gloves to keep my bed linens from being ruined.
Granny’s old-fashioned poison ivy soap made with jewel weed. Bought it years ago at the checkout at ACE Hardware. But when I read the label last week, I pitched it because—just like my own grandmother’s homemade soap—it was made with pig fat (lard).
For readers who don’t know…I grew up on a farm that specialized in raising swine. But I have followed the biblical food laws (no pork, no shell fish) since I learned them when I was about 28 years old. They are God’s scavengers (garbage collectors) and are unfit for human consumption.
And no, the incident in the Book of Acts, chapter 10 does not in any way countermand the food laws. We have covered that in a Bible study lecture decades ago, and perhaps we shall share that in blogs in the time to come.
OTC meds on recommendations from family members: Florasone cream, Technu Extreme Poison Ivy fast-acting scrub. Claims to work in 15 seconds (It did, but lasted only minutes!) What a waste!
As my daughters were becoming more and more concerned every day, they had been encouraging me to go to the Urgent Care. I resisted until they sent me this scare-you-to-death warning from online.
I was not fearful—and maybe I was stupid for not being fearful—but I had been “ingesting” poison ivy for six years now and had acquired a degree of immunity. But to ease their minds—and because I had run out of alternative options, I went to the Urgent Care on Saturday afternoon, May 30th.
There were four people in the room, but I had to wait two hours and 45 minutes before being shown a treatment room. The young female Nurse Practitioner asked me if I had inhaled smoke from burning poison ivy. I said, “Heck no, do you think I’m crazy?” And then I added with a grin, “I simply ate it.”
Actually, I did not say that first part, but as she rolled her eyes when I told her I had eaten it, she seemed at least a teensy bit curious when I told her that I had eaten a little bit once a year for the past six years and it had given me immunity.
But I was stupid, I admitted to her. I now realize there is an upper limit to how much one can consume. Furthermore, I had foolishly not followed Billy’s 48-hour rule. And in fact, I probably should have eaten only one leaf per year—period, which would have resulted in happy end of the story.
After five minutes she had sent a prescription for the steroid called Prednisone to a local pharmacy and instructed me how to take it and taper off gradually over 12 days. Last Thursday was my last dose.
It took about three days for it to begin to noticeably work, diminishing both the painful itching and the patchy skin lesions.
But whereas, before the Pred, I could not sleep due to the ceaseless itching; when the Pred finally kicked in, then I could not sleep because insomnia is a side effect of the steroid. I concluded that it must be stimulating my adrenal glands to the max. And that is one reason why they caution that one should not stay on steroids very long.
So before the Pred, I was getting only brief cat naps during a given 24-hour period but could hardly do any work due to the incessant itching.
While on the Pred, I was averaging about 3-4 hours sleep in the middle of the night. No point in laying there awake. I would get up at 4 a.m., or whatever, and try to go to sleep by midnight or later, sometimes it took a while before I finally drifted off.
So, as I have had over 25 days (and nights) to ponder all this, I realized I needed to apologize to my readers for not stressing enough that IF you decide to get natural immunity, that you must heed the 48-hour rule. And above all, heed the Disclaimer that I have posted with each “annual report,” and which I have also appended hereto.
Scripturally, I think of the parable of the Sheep and Goat Nations.
Matthew 25: 31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
All good farmers know that goats are a valuable domestic animal, well-suited for producing milk and meat, but they also seem to be able to consume poison ivy with impunity. They eat more than three leaves. Obviously, they have super immunity!
With tongue in cheek, I have decided that I will stick to being classed with the sheep and I shall not think I can consume poison ivy with impunity like a goat!
Furthermore, serious Bible students understand that the donkey/ass was and is a symbol of the pentecostal age (which does not refer specifically to the pentecostal denomination(s), but in general to roughly the past 2,000 years, the church age).
We know that in the Old Testament that God allowed Balaam’s ass to speak in one particular incident, but that normally, asses cannot speak; they are dumb asses.
Again, tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless, confessing my error, I was a dumb ass!
All humor aside now, thank you, Father, for Your mercy upon me! Let this essay be taken seriously concerning the actual dangers that can afflict us if we are not careful.
People say “Ignorance is bliss;” but Bruggeman’s corollary is “…until it kills you!”
As of this writing, three days shy of a month since it all began, I still have some mild itching on my neck and jawline, and thus, not wishing to nick myself and spread it worse, I have not shaved since this ordeal began.
As a dear friend reminded me, the healing process is following Hering’s Law of Cure, since my jaws and neck is where it all began.
Hering’s Law of Cure is a principle in homeopathy. Named after Dr. Constantine Hering (1800–1880), it describes the direction and order in which true healing occurs. It is widely used by homeopaths to distinguish genuine curative responses from symptom suppression or adverse drug reactions.
I still believe that one can gain natural immunity from poison ivy. After all, I had immunity until I went overboard a month ago. Next spring or maybe late this fall, I will start all over with a tiny, fingernail-sized piece to try and regain immunity. But never again, will I ignore the 48-hour rule!
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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