Our Disaster Dude John Saunders recently had a brush with poison ivy. He was trying out his green thumb in the garden, grabbed a handful of weeds to toss and suddenly felt his hands burning. To his surprise, he realized he had grabbed a handful of poison ivy.
A camper from “back in the day,” John said he knows the rule: “Leaves of 3; leave it be.”
But, the trouble for him was that he wasn’t expecting poison ivy to be growing in his home garden and the ivy was so young that it hadn’t fully formed.
So what did he do? He set his first aid knowledge in motion.
He rinsed his hands first (for at least 15 minutes, away from the skin so the water flow doesn’t touch any other parts of your skin). Next, he cleaned every single surface he had come in contact with and the put his clothes in the laundry – twice.
He put gloves on and scooped up the ivy with a plastic bag and put it in the garbage. He didn’t burn it because of the potential toxins touching his skin or getting him in his eyes.
“Because I knew what to do, it didn’t get worse,” he said.
All this talk about poison ivy had me thinking of Batman and the green villain, Poison Ivy. Do you remember her? Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley was once a promising botanist from Seattle poisoned with deadly herbs by her high school professor. She survives and then becomes Gotham’s most prominent eco-terrorist. Her first scheme involved threatening to release her suffocating spores into the air unless the city meets her demands.
I wonder if Batman was trained in first aid?