non-fiction

POISONED

Anne Kenner

- Those diseases which medicines do not cure, iron cures; those which iron cannot cure, fire cures; and those which fire cannot cure, are to be reckoned wholly incurable. (The Hippocratic Aphorisms, Section VIII, #87)

The wildfires started in mid-August, chewing up the dry ground and crackling trees of summer, burning for a month across 363,000 receptive acres in Napa and Sonoma. When the fires took a brief pause, we considered that perhaps our house might survive.

Our next-door neighbors concluded the same and replaced their shake roof in a matter of days with a metal one. A down-meadow neighbor razed his old apple orchard. Chainsaws and chippers buzzed up and down Sonoma Mountain, frantically working to cut and crush, raze and remove precious trees and shrubs, grasses and groundcover, anything that might revive the calming fires or attract the new ones that were sure to come.

My husband and I caught the panic, then watched as the men we hired arrived with trucks and tools to cut down one hundred bay, walnut, and madrone trees, remove brush and scrub, and mow down the tall grasses and brambles that grew around us.

Walking through a meadow they’d just left, I visited a cottonwood tree we hadn’t the heart to sacrifice and found a pile of old, embedded bay logs hiding in its shadow. I worked, sleeveless with light gloves, carrying and rolling the treacherous, tinderous logs down the hill, toward the bright yellow chipper the work crew had parked beside our smoke- ruined grapes moldering on the vine.

Halfway into the effort, I wondered to myself: what are the leaves and vines that have worked their way into and through and around and under these logs that I am carrying? Why are they red and green, yellow and brown? Why are some of the leaves rounded and others spikey, why do some appear in triplicate on the branch and others in leaflets of five?

Why are some of the stems completely stripped while others are ripe and lush?

I am adept at not seeing what I need to see in life. It is both an adaptive skill and one of my most dangerous traits. I have studied the poisoned ivies and oaks that cover our county. I’ve seen countless photographs of them and had people call my attention to their presence on hikes and walkabouts. I never seem to recognize the plants on my own, though, until I find myself in the middle of them.

*

Arsenic was the murderer’s poison of choice from ancient Rome through the High Renaissance, although belladonna worked well, too, as did hemlock, aconite, strychnine, and mandrake. Poisoning was so common and disease so misunderstood that natural causes were rarely assumed when princes and kings, cardinals and queens died.

Romans poisoned each other with alarming frequency in the Forum. Ancient Egyptians hid scorpions and adders in each other’s beds. In the Middle Ages, scheming young wives hoping to become widows dropped arsenic into their wealthy husbands’ wine, and rivals in love laced each other’s cosmetics with venom.

Henry VIII made his gentlemen of the bedchamber lick and kiss his sheets and pillows before he got into bed, to ensure no one had doused the linens with terminal belladonna, and he insisted someone else sit bare-bottomed on the chamber pots his son, Edward IV, used, in the event their surfaces had been altered to poison the prince’s precious bottom.

Among the myriad and lurid ways to die in Tudor England—plague, typhoid, small pox, malaria, childbirth, execution, and jousting, to name a few—none offended Henry more than poisoning, which he declared an act of treason in 1531 if perpetrated against anyone connected to a representative of state.

“This year,” reported the Greyfriars Chronicle in 1531, “was a cook boiled in a cauldron in Smithfield for he would have poisoned the bishop of Rochester with divers of his servants.”

Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, was sufficiently wary of the threat that she agreed “all manner of things that shall touch any part of her majesty’s body bare” be constantly guarded, tested, and examined.

Louis XIV was similarly appalled by the prospect of poisonings, and employed Officers of the Goblet to run their tongues and fingers along any dish, cutlery, or cloth bound for the King’s table; if the Officers didn’t itch or die afterward, the items were deemed safe for royal contact.

Poison was easy to find and uncomplicated to distill from the plants, insects, and snakes that flourished in the natural world. Some poisons worked better than others, and some not at all. Some could be neutralized if placed next to a toadstool or passed beneath a unicorn’s horn. Poison loomed large in the universe, though, a metaphor for the inexplicable, for shadows in doorways and the rustlings in hedgerows that gained speed and intensity during the night.

*

An hour after I carried the last hoary log to the chipper, after I changed my clothes, washed my arms, and started to think about the evening hours ahead, I felt the poison take hold. It began with a burning on my left ankle, a rush of heat along my torso, and then a frantic, furious itching from my shoulders to the line on my wrists where my work gloves had stopped.

I could not think what to do. I could not check the advancing infection. I could not keep my hands from slapping my skin, my fingers from scratching the long red lines of rash that exploded throughout the course of the evening on my chest, my stomach, behind my knees, down my forearms, and along the left side of my chin.

My frantic search for help on the internet largely taught me what would not serve: “Do not moisten affected areas!” “Avoid heat!” “Minimize icing!” “Don’t scratch!” “Do not touch!” “No showers!” “Don’t bandage or seal!”

I covered my arms with a baking soda paste that flaked and pilled on the floor as I scratched it off. I spread aloe on my legs and damp rags on my chest. I stood beneath the whirling ceiling fan and jumped up and down to distract myself, but nothing would arrest the incessant burn, the disastrous and excruciating itch with which I had been infected.

*

Toxicodendrons—poison oak, poison ivy, and their relative, the lacquer tree—have a unique and menacing ability to incapacitate. Their every physical feature, their roots, leaves, flowers, berries, and stems, are loaded with toxic urushiol, a greasy and water-repellant chemical that rapidly penetrates skin and can adhere, active and dangerous, to clothing and rake handles, shoelaces and gloves, for months or even years. Poison oaks and ivies secrete their urushiol when damaged or disturbed, sending the oily agent out to seal and protect their wounds. The chemical, when it exudes, rapidly morphs, oxidizing from a clear to cream-colored fluid, to a red-brown sap and, finally, to a flat, powdery black within thirty minutes of excretion.

The first-known references to toxicodendrons date to seventh- century China and tenth-century Japan, where the sap used to produce treasured lacquerware had long been recognized as poisonous. In the 1880s, a German geographer was infected while watching Japanese workers extract the fluid from the urushi tree. “It is a peculiar disease,” he noted and “always disagreeable . . . [G]reat heat is felt and violent itching and burning, causing many sleepless nights.”

Toxicodendrons do not exist in the Old World but were remarked upon soon enough by the Europeans who invaded the New one. John Smith, who colonized Virginia on behalf of James I, published the first written account of “the poisonous weed” in 1609:

“[B]eing in shape but little different from our English ivie; but being touched causeth redness, itchings, and lastly blysters, the which howsoever, after a while they pass away of themselves without further harme; yet because for the time they are somewhat painefull, and in aspect dangerous, it hath gotten itself an ill name . . . .”

Only people and certain other primates are susceptible to urushiol; 85 percent of the world’s human population is actively allergic to it.

If you are human, then, and unwise enough to molest one of these plants, to bend a leaf, pick a berry, brush up against a yellow-green flower, or carry old logs around which they have been wrapped, it is highly likely that uruthiol will enter your oxygenated bloodstream, bind with the proteins in your skin, and provoke an excruciating war with your immune system.

*

Thirty-six hours after the itching began, I called my doctor, a concise diagnostician with little patience for sentiment and indirection. “What are your symptoms?” she asked, squinting into the FaceTime screen.

“I can’t sleep,” I told her, “and I can’t eat. I’m jumping out of my skin. I’m scratching and bleeding. My skin feels like it’s burning. The rash is spreading, and some of it’s running in straight lines and some in swirls. It’s on my arms and my wrists, my stomach and thighs. It’s on my left foot, and I think it’s in my eyes.”

“Why do you think it’s in your eyes?” she asked.

“Because I can’t open my left one,” I answered.

“Show me,” she said, putting her face up close to the camera on her laptop.

I did the same to her.

“Show me your profile,” she said.

I turned to the right.

“You’re going to need steroids,” she told me. “A really strong dose of them. And then you’re going to need something for the steroids. Because the steroids are going to drive you crazy.”

*

Unlike many more mysterious diseases of the skin, poison oak rash is easy to identify. Its bumps and burns, its blisters and bubbles can be found annually on at least fifty-five million people in the United States alone. Next to acne, eczema, shingles, and hives, contact poisoning from toxicodendrons is the most common human skin disease in the world.

The only adequate defense against these plants is avoidance. “Learn to recognize and spurn poison ivies and oaks,” we’re told.

“Leaves of three, beware of me!” announce advisory signs on hiking trails and mountain club doors.

“Longer middle stem, stay away from them.”

“Hairy vine, don’t touch mine.”

“If it’s shiny, watch your hiney.”

Charming warnings and mnemonic tricks are useless when it comes to poison oak, however, because it is a duplicitous shape-shifter. Its leaves can be oval or tapered, with leaflets of three, or four, or even five. The margins on poison oak leaves are wavy unless they’re deep, their stems smooth or stiff, shrub-like or viny. In the spring, poison oak can look green and red, or green and shiny. In summer, its blossoms may appear green or, then again, white. In autumn, the leaves dependably turn deep red but can mask their true color by burrowing against other fall-changing foliage. In winter, the plants shed their verdure to become benign-looking sticks that jut straight up from the ground, unless they choose to lean against adjacent trees and shrubs and thereby hide among their neighbors’ shoots.

When describing these poisonous plants to his seventeenth-century audience, John Smith opined that despite their “ill name,” they were “questionless of noe very ill nature.” Smith’s contemporaries believed in their “potential for many usefull employments, which time and industry no doubt will one day discover.”

But how can plants that so determinedly hide their essential nature, and so reliably torment those who fall for the deceit, be good-natured? What could be benign about a growth that tricks you into intimate contact and then ravages your skin, erupting in boils and snaking lines of red bumps that bleed and weep without surcease, that itch and then scorch, that keep you awake all night and drive you to distraction and despair?

What about these plants could serve us right? By this, I do not mean to ask what it is about these that plants we deserve; many might think we merit far worse. Rather, how are we improved by the pain and suffering of their lurking, virulent poison? What positive good does that suffering produce; what habit of patience and penance does it reinforce?

Because it has not produced or reinforced any positive good in me.

*

“Start with twenty milligrams of prednisone right now,” said my doctor, “and another twenty tonight. It’s a high dose, but it should nip the infection in the bud.”

To counteract the prednisone, she prescribed a narcotizing antihistamine, and to address the persistent, nagging, terrifying itching, she added steroidal creams and ointments.

“Use them sparingly,” she said. “They’re powerful, and they should help. But pace yourself because they’ll thin your skin.”

I took the prednisone and the antihistamine, used the creams, and washed my arms with various homeopathic scrubs I found at our small Sonoma pharmacy. Instead of shrinking in the face of this medicinal assault, however, my infection raged; instead of slowing down, the poison oak rash spread to my right foot, under my arms, along my jawline and the nape of my neck.

“Bump it up to thirty milligrams of prednisone in the morning and thirty at night,” my doctor instructed me. “And if you’re not better after a day, take forty milligrams in the morning and forty at night.”

“That’s a very high dose,” I observed.

“It’s a hefty-man dose,” she acknowledged, “but you have a hefty infection, and we need to knock it out.”

At thirty milligrams of prednisone every morning and night, the rash briefly paused, then returned with a terrifying vigor. At forty milligrams twice a day, the infection finally faltered. My skin stopped burning, the unbearable itching grew more intermittent, the streaky red lines and sworls stopped spreading, and I was able to sleep a few hours at night. Unfortunately, though, the medicine that was finally killing the rash was poisoning me, too.

*

By 1640, settlers in the Americas had collected and cultivated various strains of poison ivies and oaks, and sent them back to Europe as curiosities, representatives of the strange and interesting plants and animals that abounded in the New World.

The poisonous plants were exhibited at Kew Gardens and by the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. Empress Josephine Bonaparte was purportedly charmed by their appearance in her garden, and a famous painting by Pierre-Joseph Redouté of poison ivy in full berry was included in a luxury nineteenth-century publication on France’s native and imported plants.

The plant was considered piquant, a prank to play on the gullible and a titillating discovery to share. André-Ignace-Joseph Dufresnoy, a late-eighteenth-century French physician, fervently believed in the plant’s potential medicinal uses, and he persuaded one gullible young florist to rub and crush poison ivy leaves with his bare hands. The florist contracted a virulent and torturous rash but noticed, after recovering, that a deep, marled scar he’d long carried on his wrist had disappeared along with the rash. Dufresnoy spent subsequent years promoting various medicinal tinctures and potables derived from toxicodendrons cultivated in his home garden. After he died, though, his pharmacist brother destroyed the poisonous garden, not having shared the doctor and John Smith’s belief in their essential good nature.

*

Prednisone is a potent corticosteroid, a precious and critical tool in calming the body’s immune response to disease or injury when that response is excessive and unconstructive. The drug’s very potency in attacking the immune system, however, destabilizes other critical aspects of the human metabolism. On the more benign side, it can cause weight gain or diminished appetite, headaches and fluid retention, nausea and vomiting. Taken at higher potencies, however, and allowing for the idiosyncrasies of a given patient, the drug can engender mood swings and personality changes, depression and insomnia, cognitive impairment and psychotic behavior.

My response to eighty milligrams of prednisone tended toward the idiosyncratic. Though the drug calmed my itching and burning skin, it also amped me up, made me jumpy, prevented me from sleeping, sitting still, resting my brain. It made me irritable, excitable, impatient, and impolite. A mere seventy-two hours into my heightened dosing regimen, it felt as if the drug were clambering inside me, scrabbling up and down my extremities, scrambling my brain, racing my heart.

“I’ve been occupied by a hostile force,” I told my husband as I paced back and forth in the hallway, the driveway, and along the garden path. “I am now someone else,” I thought to myself as I marched around the steep mountains surrounding our home, trying desperately to calm the appalling energy that chattered in my chest.
I was mean. I was snappish. I said something that made my daughter cry and another thing that made my son turn away and hit a wall with his fist.

I saw the side eyes, the stink eyes, the rolling eyes of my family members as they bobbed and weaved my irascibility and hyperactivity. I understood, I was mortified, I was outraged.

“You have to stop the drug,” my husband said.

And he was right.

So on a Sunday morning, I packed up my car and left my shell-shocked family for San Francisco, where I would stay alone for a few days and taper off the prednisone, all the while hoping the poison oak did not reignite as a consequence.

*

Pruritis, or itching, has enduringly fascinated medical healers. The third- and fourth-century Hippocratic scholars were among the first to conclude that itching wasn’t a punishment from the gods, but they couldn’t locate causes and cures beyond a general embrace of humoral medicine. Physical and mental well-being, they believed, depended upon a precise and nimble relationship between four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. An excess or deficiency in one of these humors, natural or exacerbated by the outward disturbances of seasonal change, over-exertion, licentious indulgence in food or drink, was the source of ill-health. Accordingly, the scholars could conclude, “certain forms of leprosy and joint pain are itchy when rain is impending.”

In the sixth century, Alexander of Tralles suggested in one of his Twelve Books on Medicine that itchy scalps should be treated with “crush[ed] rue and alum in honey . . . .” A hundred years later, the Greek physicians Paul of Aegina and Theophanes Nonnos agreed that any “itch that comes about in old age” is incurable. In his eleventh-century Canon of Medicine, the Persian doctor Avicenna noted that southern winds soothe itching, for “they relax the body and open the pores, stimulating the humours and expelling them.”

Itching is a particularly treacherous form of pain. You hope to resolve it by scratching, but scratching merely invites the itch back into your life after the briefest respite, often with a vengeance and violence that not only makes you regret scratching but makes you ashamed to have done so.

It’s understandable, then, that itching has been long and widely reviled. In eighteenth-century England, pruritis was regarded as a sign of moral degradation, frequently associated with the class of individuals who occupied jails, workhouses, orphanages, and hospitals.

Greedy palms “itched for money.” Idle ears “itched for gossip.” Pruritis was indicative of contagion and filth, pestilence and plague. Unlike the Hippocratic Scholars, early Puritans like Benjamin Wadsworth believed that “all our bodily illnesses and ailments whatsoever, are ordered forth by God, as to the kind or sort, the measure and degree, the duration, and all the preceeding, consomitant and consequent circumstances of them.” Surely, they agreed with their peers in Europe and colonial America who considered itching a metaphor for unmasterable and undesirable impulses: curiosity, gambling, lust, pride, indiscretion, debauchery.

“Don’t scratch,” my mother would tell me, if I worried a childhood mosquito bite or my itchy chicken pox. “You might get infected.”

Which, of course, was bad.

*

I arrived in San Francisco determined to oust the ill humors from my body, to purge both the prednisone and the rash it was meant to cure. I turned on the lights and unpacked my suitcase. I went to a grocery store and bought things that looked wholesome and honest: green broccoli and yellow peaches, round onions and orange peppers, tomatoes, scallions, endives, and apples. I roasted them in the oven and ate them. I sat in a tub, filling it with lukewarm water and Domeboro powder, then cool water and Aveeno powder, sprinkling in colloidals and talcs that promised to “dry oozing,” “ease itching,” “calm and soothe,” “relieve and protect.”

By mid-evening, I could sense the shaking and rattling diminish, the burning under my scalp recede and the itching on my tortured forearms finally relax. The drug still agitated me, still buzzed in my heart, but I felt quieter, less furious, glad for the privacy and the reprieve from my family’s dismayed regard.

Unfortunately, also by mid-evening, the dormant wildfires north of the city rekindled. Even as my own searing itch abated, a new and extraordinary conflagration had begun, ferociously scorching an inexorable path from Napa Valley toward the Sonoma mountains, toward my family and our home.

At 10:30, my husband’s cell phone sounded the high buzz of an Amber Alert, directing his attention to the rapid spread, the combustible danger, the absolute necessity of fleeing the approaching flames.

“The fires are back,” he texted me at midnight, “and they’re spreading fast.”

“Do you mind if we come to San Francisco?” my son wrote. “It’s not safe here anymore.”

And then they evacuated, fleeing the fires that were now just five miles away.

*

Nietzsche overreached when he proclaimed, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Because what does not kill you can still totally mess up your life.

The Russians who Putin keeps poisoning certainly aren’t any better off as a result, even when they outlast the initial assault. In 2018, the exiled spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were poisoned with a Russian nerve agent while sitting on a park bench in Salisbury, England. They eventually recovered, spent a year in an MI6 safehouse, then were spirited off to an unknown location to live hunted lives under assumed identities. In August 2020, opposition leader Alexei Navalny was administered a similar poison while a passenger on a Russian plane. Navalny found safe haven at a German hospital, where he was placed in a medically-induced coma for weeks and is expected to experience lasting and unpredictable disabilities. Viktor Yushchenko isn’t Russian, but Putin hated and poisoned him with dioxin anyway. Yushchenko survived the 2004 attack, but with significant after-effects, including a severely disfigured face.

I doubt that the twenty-five students in central China whose teacher, Wang Yun, laced their breakfast porridge last year with sodium nitrate after they didn’t respond to more benign methods of discipline are any sturdier for it. In the immediate moment, the children fainted and vomited. Longer term, it’s safe to presume they’ll have trust issues when it comes to adults and education.

Toxicodendrons aren’t dangerous for everyone, of course. Birds— woodpeckers, robins, warblers, waxwings—thrive on poison oak berries in the summer and fall, and towhees build their nests in the plant. Deer, squirrels, goats, and pond turtles eat the leaves and stems, and small land and water animals of all kinds find shelter in poison oak thickets.

But, contrary to Nietzche’s promise, my bout with poison oak did not make me stronger. Instead, it compromised my swagger and resilience, made me skeptical and resigned. When I opened my laptop to study the latest wildfire maps with their blinking red and yellow zones, or read the evacuation orders that had sent my family flying and daily engulfed more cities and towns, I did not respond with my accustomed fight.

“If we burn,” I thought to myself, “I won’t rebuild.”

“Whether or not the fire gets us,” I told my husband, “I’ve had enough.”

“But it’s our home,” he remonstrated.

And it was. For sixteen years we had planted and nurtured, walked and cherished our scrappy garden, unmown meadow, and small, stubborn vineyard. With countless friends, we harvested the annual bounty from our ancient fig tree as well as the apricot, apple, and pear trees that fruited in unpredictable years. During the day, we’d scan the sky for red- tailed hawks who squabbled with crows, and at night we watched bats swoop and the occasional fox or pink-eyed possum approach the tamer grass near our house. But what had before thrilled me about this remote and feral mountain, now exhausted me. What had once excited me about its wild and persistent encroachment, now frightened me. I had lost my once-fervent belief in its benignity; I no longer trusted the place, with its flammable trees and scheming poison oak.

*

As it happened, we didn’t burn. By some agonizing fluke, a random and unearned intercession, the winds changed yet again and the fires that had come so terrifyingly close headed away from us and back toward Napa where they had begun.

Eight days after evacuating, we returned to find our house intact, the partially logged trees and half-cleared ground just as we had left them but for a thin layer of ash that coated our garden table and chairs, the over- ripe figs on the tree, and the soft red tomatoes still hanging on their vines.

The men came back to finish chainsawing and chipping, cutting and raking, bagging and discarding any tree, bush, or plant that might beckon the next fire. During that first morning’s break, I spoke to the foreman who stood next to a big red truck.

“Ah,” he said, looking at my scabbing arms, “you touched the poison oak.”

I walked with him, then, to the cottonwood tree and pointed to the plant that had poisoned me.

“Can you kill it?” I asked him.

“Poison oak is very hard to kill,” he answered. “If you cut it down, it grows back. If you dig up the roots, new ones replace them. If you set the plant on fire, it comes back stronger than ever.”

“What can we do, then?”

“The only thing to do is to poison it,” he answered. “But then we poison everything around it as well.”

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“No,” he agreed, “we cannot. So you will have to be careful. You will have to watch out for the poison oak. Because it will be watching for you.”

BOULEVARD

Home

Poisoned