But there are two bodily functions that I can think of that are more than vulnerable to suggestion. Once the suggestion is made, one cannot keep from performing the function. A person can resist the desire to eat a cheeseburger. A person can even resist the suggestion that she wants to consume chocolate (or so I’m told). And, scintillating as the beer ads are, men can resist both the beer and the urge to run out and, um, “party” with scantily clad babes. But there are two bodily functions that, once mentioned, viewed, or thought about, the average person cannot resist actually performing. Some people might be able to hold out longer than others, but no one can completely resist.
These functions are yawning and scratching an itch.
There is a Dr. Seuss book called simply, “The Sleep Book.” On the cover are two Seussian creatures who are yawning. The adult who is about to embark on reading this book to a child will see the cover and stifle a yawn. However, the reader is about to be bombarded by pictures of denizens of Seussland yawning and will have to read Seuss’s prose about yawning. And the reader will have to actually say, out loud (oops, I just yawned), the word “yawn” repeatedly. I believe that there is something about the very word “yawn” that sets us up physiologically to...ummm, uhhhh, oh, damn!...yawn. I wonder if that’s true in all languages?
I don’t know about you, but I have already yawned at least four times since I began writing the above paragraph.
But yawning was just the intro. Our real subject today is the itch. I was going to do a Top 10 countdown of things that will make you feel itchy. But I could only think of nine. Then, the Top Nine countdown became way too long, so I cut it down even more. Following is my final countdown of six things that make you feel so itchy that their mere mention will compel you, against your will, to scratch. If you are able to resist this urge all the way to the end, I would like to know about it.
And, in case you are curious to the point of distraction, the items I omitted were wool, sunburn, and allergic reactions. This is still way too long for a blog post, so only those who are just itching to know will read on.
The Itch List
6. Mites
Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung, or frass, as it is known to entomologists.
Let me repeat: one-tenth of your six-year-old pillow’s weight consists of dead skin, mites–both living and dead–and mite crap. ‘Nuff said.
5. Chigger, mosquito, and other bug bites
A few years ago, at the height of summer heat, a bunch of us went hiking. It was the world’s dullest, most boring hike (we didn’t know that beforehand). By the next day, all but one of our party had succumbed to chiggers. I've been on hikes that resulted in chigger bites, but I've at least been able to say that it was worth it. If ever there was a hike that did not warrant chigger bites, this one was it.
Because we were suffering so badly, we did a fair amount of research on chiggers. It turns out that most of what you think you know about chiggers is not true. In fact, not much is actually known about these devilish little beasts.
Conventional wisdom says that chiggers burrow deep into your skin and then remain alive there for a while, leaving a small tunnel up to the surface to give them air to breathe. However, many bug scientists, also known as entomologists, say that there is no evidence to support this theory. They believe that, just like mosquitoes, chiggers bite you once and then take off, leaving an extremely toxic and itchy poison behind.
Conventional wisdom also says that one should paint the bites with clear fingernail polish, as this will seal off the chiggers’ breathing tunnels, causing them to die off sooner. I remember having even bought an expensive topical medical treatment that was supposed to not only treat the itch of the bites but also seal off the tunnels. All such treatments are, according to entomologists, so much snake oil.
At this point, I don’t really know what is true and what is false about the chiggers themselves. But let’s get to the important thing about them: their bites itch like crazy. One of our group of hikers counted something like 54 chigger bites from his waist down. Chigger bites make you want to take up itching as a profession. You feel like you could just sit and scratch your bites for not only 40 hours a week, but you could also go into overtime. Chigger bites take on a life of their own. You absolutely must scratch them. You tell yourself not to, but at the same time, your hands develop an agenda of their own, and at the very time that your brain is saying, in a very aloof, cocky tone, “It’s mind over matter. I’ve overcome this.” your hands are scratching bites like madmen.
I feel pretty much the same way about mosquitoes, which love me. But I’m not going to expound on every sort of itchy bug bite that I’ve encountered (and just think of all of the exotic ones in Africa and Australia and Asia that we haven’t even had any experience with!).
I think that we–those of us who are the favorite meal of biting insects–can all agree that bug bites are pretty bad. And some of those chigger bites can itch for up to two weeks or so. There is just one insect that I haven’t mentioned here because it deserves a number of its own; you’ll get to it momentarily.
I don’t’ know about you, but I’ve been scratching myself pretty constantly for the last couple of minutes. Especially my head and neck. Which brings us to number four.
4. Lice
Separate from other bugs because they don’t just bite you once and then die or leave. They live on you. What I mean to say is, “They live on you.” They don’t just bite you to make you itch. They walk around on whatever part they are infesting. And for the purposes of modesty and the fact that we are in mixed company, I will address only the pain, humiliation, and itchiness of head lice here.
Let’s get back to “they walk around on whatever part....” They are there, living on your scalp (or whatever) when you wake up in the morning, as you shower (which seems to send the little devils into apopolexy), as you eat your lunch, as you sit–quietly scratching– watching TV at night, and when you go to bed.
Bed. Where you lie at night, imagining the lice just pouring off your head onto your pillow, some of them burrowing into its depths as others go marching across the bed, streaming into the weave of every fabric in your home. They will infest the bedclothes, the carpet, all of your clothing, and the drapes. They will get into papers and books and newspapers. If you’ve ever had to eradicate lice from your home, you know that arson is the only real solution. It’s the only sure-fire method for killing them all and keeping them from coming back. And you must not salvage anything–no, nothing at all– from your home that is made from any kind of fibers or has a porous surface, if you wish to truly be rid of this plague on humanity. You must be willing to turn your back on your favorite dress, that sweater that sets off your eyes, your expensive sheets, your children’s kindergarten drawings, your and your children’s hair, the family Bible that documents 12 generations of your ancestors, and the family pet. All must be sacrificed to this scourge if you are to keep from having repeated bouts with them for months after the initial contact.
Maybe you are undaunted by all of this. If so, I can say with absolute certainty that you have never had an infestation of lice. I have had lice. I cannot even think of them now without getting them all over again. In fact, scientists now understand that thinking about lice is what causes lice. They are able to burst spontaneously forth, formed by human thought–sort of like Athena from the head of Zeus–and transformed into viable, living, breathing life forms. It is absolutely vital that you not think of lice. Now or ever. Oh, wait. It’s too late for that, isn’t it?
3. That itch you can't get to
Any itch that cannot be reached is a special torment to its sufferer, and is more than likely the work of the devil. I am referring here to that itch that begins to develop under a cast that you have to be in for three more weeks, painful rectal itch (see item 2 for more on this one), an itch way down inside your ear, and that itch on your back–right in the middle, between your shoulder blades but a little further down, yeah, right there...no, a little to the left, oh yeah...wait, no, a little further down.
An itch you cannot reach is one of the leading causes of insanity. People have lost their minds and been admitted into asylums just because of the itch that can’t be reached. Most will regain their sanity once the itch goes away, but for some, it is too late. Long exposure to unreachable itching will cause permanent madness. For this reason, it does not matter what measures you must go to to get to an itch that can’t be reached, as stupid, crazy, and dangerous as the answer might be, you must go to any length to get to the itch that is plaguing you.
We all know about people taking any long, thin article that they can get hold of to slide down between a cast and their skin to provide relief from the unreachable itch. One of my nephews, when he was little, had a raging ear infection that, it turned out, was causing itching that he was too young to be able to verbalize. He did what any sane, mature, right-thinking person would have done in that circumstance. He tore the wire leg off of a pink flamingo and rammed it straight down his ear canal, puncturing his eardrum and making it bleed. He lost his hearing for a couple of months over that, by golly, it was worth it. He got rid of the itch, and that’s really all that matters.
If you see someone who has backed up against a door frame, the edge of a bookcase, or a fencepost that happens to be covered with rusted barbed wire, heaving themselves up and down and back and forth, just nod sagely, knowing that they are preserving their mental health.
2. Feminine itch
We are in mixed company, and it simply would not do to go into the details of this particular kind of itch. I do not know, and–I cannot stress this enough–I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW whether there is a male version of this particular kind of itch. Part of the pain of this itch is that it falls into that category of “itches you can’t reach.” So, I suppose that, as Saturday Night Live dubbed it many years ago in their “Smuckers” commercial, Painful Rectal Itch is, for men, pretty similar to feminine itch (however, women experience both and I think that all women would agree that feminine itch is worse).
And, I think that I’ve mentioned this, I DO NOT want to be any more enlightened on the male perspective on this topic.
So, just like in toilet paper commercials, let’s talk all around the subject without actually talking about the subject. Speaking of commercials, I am always amused by ads for products that treat “feminine itch” as it has so gingerly been named by marketeers. “Feminine itch.” Doesn’t it sound so delicate, so genteel, so demure, so proper, so, so, so...NOT something that would make you murder someone to get it to stop?
Okay, this is going beyond the TMI standard that I tried to set in the first paragraph on this topic, but I will end with this quote from one of my aunts regarding feminine itch, and which I think pretty much says it all about this kind of itch. “I felt like douching with gasoline and then lighting a match.”
This is why feminine itch is number two. It would have been number one except that it plagues only half of the world’s population.
1. Poison ivy (and the like)
If you consider yourself susceptible to poison ivy because you have once or twice in your life gotten a blister or two or three after a day of clearing brush out of the yard, then you will wonder why I’ve saved poison ivy for last. If you’ve gotten a bit of a poison ivy rash on your arm, let’s say it left big enough welts that you can clearly see that you touched, say, three vines, then you can begin to appreciate why I saved poison ivy for last, as those three lines of rash should give you just enough itching to make you understand what an all-out poison ivy attack is about.
If, like me, you have been rendered into a leperous-looking, skin-sloughing, blister-oozing, fluid-dripping, Calamine-covered zombie by poison ivy, then you can fully appreciate why poison ivy has won the number-one spot.
My first encounter with poison ivy was on the playground at school. I was in second grade. My little friend, Jill, and I–in spite of our teacher’s dire warnings about this dangerous plant–decided that we would smear the leaves all over each other. Well, you see, the teacher actually showed the plant, which was all over a huge tulip poplar on the playground, to our class. She taught us what poison ivy is, and she warned us, “Don’t touch this plant. Do not get near it, and do not get it on you.” Well, Jill and I discussed this plant. We absolutely agreed that a plant could not be poisonous. Snakes were poisonous. Some spiders were poisonous. But a plant? No way.
So, we hatched a plan. Mrs. Williams had said not to touch the plant and not to get it on us, right? Being little philistines, we ignored those parts of the teacher’s warning that did not suit us. So, that part about “don’t touch it” didn’t enter into our scheme. We concentrated on that part of her warning that went, “don’t get it on you.” We agreed that we would not get it on us, we would get it on each other. So, Jill grabbed a handful of leaves and rubbed them all over me–every bit of exposed skin that she could find. I grabbed a handful of leaves and did the same to Jill.
Guess who was susceptible to poison ivy?
I swelled up like a toad. My arms, legs, neck, and face were thickly covered with big blisters full of poison. My eyes swelled shut. I couldn’t open my mouth to eat. And the itching! Beyond anything that I can describe even to this day. Do you know how helpful it is to have your mother saying to you in a calm, rational tone of voice, “Don’t scratch” when every cell of your body feels like it will burst into flame if you don’t dig into yourself with all of the fingernails you can muster? And calamine lotion. Useless.
I studiously–and very obediently–avoided poison ivy from that moment on. I learned to identify it from 15 feet away, and I tried to make sure that I never got near it again. But something happened, and four years later, when I was in sixth grade, I got it again. I don’t even know how.
All I know is that, again, my legs and arms were covered with blisters that would break and ooze awful-looking, sticky, yellow fluid all over the place. By this time, I understood that I really should control myself and not scratch. One day, sitting in Mrs. White’s English class (my favorite), the combination of the itching and pain, the unfulfilled desire to scratch, and the intense heat in the room (this was before air-conditioning in schools), I dropped into a dead faint. Unconsciousness was bliss. I was brought to, very much against my will, by smelling salts. I resented that. Unconsciousness had been a peaceful interlude, a brief respite–absolute heaven, in other words–from the constant pain, itching, and oozing. I was sent home, where I remained for the next few days, trying to figure out how to reach a state of blissful oblivion again. Sixth-graders, in my day, did not have ready access to recreational drugs, so I was doomed to a state of painful awareness.
Poison ivy will, like the itch you can’t get to, drive you to madness. That’s because no amount of scratching will ever satisfy poison ivy’s need to be scratched. You can scratch at poison ivy until you draw blood, and still it will itch even more than it hurts. Poison ivy will make you itch to the point where you feel like you need to be put into an induced coma for the duration. You do not want your poison ivy rash to be treated with any kind of drug or steroid or lotion; you simply want to be unconscious while it runs its course. But, since most doctors will not agree to induce a coma for poison ivy, you are left alone with the unrelenting itching.
So, there you have it. The Itch List.
The order in which I’ve listed these things doesn’t matter. You might have put them in a different order than I did. That’s fine. You might even have some things I didn’t think of to add to my list (I’d like to hear about them). My main goal was to make you itch to the point where you HAD to scratch. Did it work? Let me know.
Well...yawn. I think it’s time for bed.
