An Itch in Time

The house is on poison oak alert, and has been for a week. The youngest among us has been red and puffy ever since she returned from a foray in the woods with a few of her friends, where they went to "build a tree house." (That they went to do this without wood or hammers or saws or nails is not entirely relevant, since none of them had any carpentry experience.) This is the same person who, six years ago and counting, crawled into our bed to watch TV or to nap or to do something, wearing the very same clothes she had been wearing minutes earlier when she romped through a poison oak infested field near the house. My wife and I were not pleased when, a day or so later, we discovered poison oak on our bodies where we did not want it to be.

This time, things are easier for us. Our daughter is now old enough to take Prednisone, which should lessen the severity and duration of the outbreak, and she was long ago banished from our bed. The only thing we have to contend with is the complaining, which actually goes with the territory. (We're talking about a young lady who dutifully informs us of every single ache and pain she has, bar none, without regard for the severity (or lack thereof) of said ache or pain. Or scrape or bump or piece of skin falling off or discolored region on a nail.

Now, I remember being the opposite as a child. I do not recall complaining about aches and pains and/or broken bones sticking out of my skin. (Although, to be fair, I have never broken a bone. That hasn't left much to complain about in the broken bone department.) Perhaps it's because boys are expected to be stoic. On at least one occasion, I had to walk several miles to the doctor's office, in the middle of a New York winter, only to be diagnosed with either pleurisy or walking pneumonia. Not that I minded the walk; it was what we did in Queens when we had to go somewhere that the bus or subway didn't go. But it doesn't seem like something you'd send a sick person, running a fever, to do these days. Then again, I lived through the experience.