Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Complicated Lives....part 16

Impetigo and pus sores

Ok…I’ll admit it. I’ve used mountain medicine! Egg shell lining on a splinter or sticker (small thorns) in your skin…it’ll have that bugger festered out by morning! Sore throat or cough? Shot of Kessler’s blended whiskey in a cup of hot water with a slice of lemon and some honey…that’s a hot toddy! As a child of the 70’s we took a lot of injuries and laughed them off. We DID NOT want to tell Mama that we had fallen out of a tree and broken a leg..we’d walk it off until she made us set the table and then fall down writhing in pain. I got a knife stuck in my thumb once…(loads of neat stuff inside a thumb btw!!) I was trying to carve a wooden sign with a paring knife..it didn’t go well at all! I snuck inside the house hiding my thumb, went to the bathroom..pushed a lump of something back inside..taped it, put a bandaid on it and went back out to the sign. Ah memories!

One day my cinderblock throwing cousins and I had seen a great episode of some tv show about Native Americans using mud and plants for things. We decided that we must use this new and forbidden knowledge of healing. We played some character building game, possibly with thrown hammers or knives. I ended up getting a nasty scrape on the side of my knee. YES!!! Native American leaf healing could begin! One cousin spit in the dirt, I chewed up a chinaberry leaf, and another cousin got leaves from the Catawba worm tree. Cousin 1 applied the dirt poultice, I applied the chewed leaf plaster, and cousin 2 slapped a big leaf over the top to hold it all in. We had a really great time playing even though all the ‘medicine’ fell off. Time passed

I woke up with odd sores on my body. My Mama tried scrubbing me..I got more sores!! We went to see the doctor. The ‘medicine’ gave me impetigo!! {Mama called it infantiego, so when I saw impetigo listed in a book or something I of course used the proper pronunciation of infantiego.} Impetigo! OH NO!!! I had pus sores! Only the dirtiest kids had one admirably large pus sore on a knee or something. I now had oozy ugly sores all over but not one single one was an impressively large playground worthy pus sore. I had shunned girl sores!

I had to wash in Safeguard soap, use some medicine..I forget, but it wasn’t our leaf/dirt concoction.

Ah I really miss childhood!! Poultice anyone

1 comment:

E. M. Prokop said...

hahaha! 'Shunned girl sores'! That's the funniest thing I ever heard! Or one of them anyways...Sounds like you are feeling well these days....I'm alright too...I guess I am just not in the mood to do any blogging, or facebooking, or tweetering........Of all of those, I think I actually like blogging the most and will probably pick it up again fairly soon..thanks for the comment Vicki! What's up with all the Russian on my site, in the comment box?? You see that? What the hell......I must be huge in Moscow!!lol!