I’m an archaeologist, meaning I work outside and end up with poison ivy a few times a year and often have a bad farmer’s tan. When my sister asked me to be her maid of honor last year, she specifically asked me to make sure that I didn’t have an awful farmers tan or poison ivy for her wedding, to which I agreed. I had an agreement with my supervisor that I wouldn’t be in the field the two weeks before her wedding to ensure this.
However… two weeks ago we had a permit from a federal agency unexpectedly come in earlier than we were anticipating that had very specific dates in which we were allowed to do the field work. And my name was on the permit so I had to be the one to do it. It was basically go out and do the fieldwork this past Thursday and Friday or never be able to do it and lose a valuable client. My field is precarious enough as it is due to all the cuts the US government is making right now that i definitely didn’t want to screw this up for us. So I told my supervisor that I’d do the fieldwork and just be extra careful.
I wore long sleeves and scrubbed with technu as soon as I got home, but only wore gloves when I absolutely had to as I didn’t see any poison ivy out. We use an ipad for a lot of data recording and have to do a lot of writing with pencil and paper as well so gloves would have had to be coming on and off anyways. But, despite the technu, I still have poison ivy that is steadily appearing on the back of my right hand and my thigh at the moment. The other people who were out in the field with me also have started developing poison ivy, so it was probably everywhere on site or the oils were on our equipment from a previous site. Gloves still could have helped reduce my chance though.
I’m hoping it doesn’t get to bad, but with my history it probably will be visible/nasty by next Saturday. And I react really horribly to steroids. They make me paranoid and jittery, and because I have an autoimmune disease, I have to taper off them very slowly so I don’t end up getting into a huge debilitating flare. I haven’t broken the news to my sister yet because I am holding out hope that it will be mild enough no one else will notice due to the technu. And I will go get steroids if it gets bad. But I definitely messed up and broke the one promise I made to my sister for her wedding.
TL;DR I promised my sister I wouldn’t have poison ivy for her wedding. I got poison ivy a week before her wedding.