hell's itch

I have a friend who loves sunscreen with the same fervor that born-again Christians love God's son, Jesus Christ. She slathers cream on herself anytime she ventures outside, offers small vials as party gifts, and almost certainly uses it as the base of her egg salad recipe. For this alabaster-skinned chum of mine, sunscreen is no mere ointment. It is the smearable foundation upon which a regimented, well-ordered life is built, discipline in a tube, the closest humanity has come to dominance over the forces of nature. When our skin is without protection, I can hear her muttering, we are no better than barbarians.

The sunburn I suffered last weekend is best described as a Rothko painting. The upper half of the oeuvre - my thigh, until a few inches above the knee - is a pasty white, the color of a Pillsbury roll before entering the oven. The lower half - or the knee to the foot, without the mercy of interruption - is a red so bright and vivid that President Kennedy would've mistaken it for the phone used to defuse nuclear tensions with the Kremlin. There exists no demarcation between the two, no muddling of shades. There is simply pale and inflamed. Rothko's critics would have deemed it a minor work, perhaps one produced while burdened with significant health complications. Rothko himself would have certainly disowned it.

You can imagine the smug superiority in my friend's tone when I sent her photos of the burn. She did not appreciate unsolicited images of my thighs - few people do - but that alone did not explain her frantic usage of caps lock, the exclamation marks placed one after another, the questions delivered as statements. 'Are you pukey from poisoning' she asked, hoping secretly for a yes. 'How's the patient' she queried later in the day, the little grin forming at the corner of her mouth as undeniable as the blisters beginning to bubble beneath my skin.

The patient, it must be acknowledged, was not well. The burn, inflicted on a windy Saturday spent lounging alongside an idyllic Martha's Vineyard cove, was immediately recognized as serious, heavy with consequence. I am the proud owner of a sunburn appreciated in its time. That afternoon, as I ventured to the water's edge, willing to defy my deeply-held phobia of the sea to cool my charred body, a friend on the beach sat up straight. I remember looking back and seeing her remove her sunglasses - the type of reaction I expect my shirtless body to receive and rarely do. When I returned, she grimaced and looked down wordlessly at the sunscreen bottle nestled in her hands. Later, as a strange, contorted smile spread across her face, she would tell me the aerosol spray had expired.

The day after a sunburn is always cloudy, as if to remind you of the darkness you have visited upon yourself. The sun has moved away - not to spare you its rays, but because you don't deserve its warmth. I did not complain; the shade was welcome. In any case, the heat emanating from my calves and my back and one swerving swath across my abdomen was enough to heat a small yurt. I rode the ferry stoic as the wind swatted my parboiled skin, and then squirmed for the five-hour drive home. At a Rhode Island rest stop, my greedy cigarette inhalations were interrupted by a stranger asking me to step away from her - the carcinogenic plumes would aggravate her sinus condition. She was lying, I knew. Her real reason was obvious. No one wants to be associated with a human plum tomato.

If Sunday was humiliation and shame, Monday was agony. I awoke in my childhood bedroom (summer living arrangement, the less detail the better) feeling like a transient community of fire ants had declared residency in the small of my back. They were angry, they were vindictive, they had the law on their side, and they were intent on burrowing. This was not the kind of pain you can set to one side, or medicate with anything over the counter. Still, I tried. Before me, lay a smorgasbord of ineffective treatment methods. I did breathing exercises, performing my best imitation of a hyperventilating Wim Hof. Advil was smuggled down my throat at irresponsible rates, followed quickly by its compatriot, Benadryl. Soon appeared anonymous hands coated with aloe vera, massaging every inch of my back (to which the pain, oddly, was contained) - an act of parental kindness for which I was initially grateful, then immediately furious. The aloe angered the fire ants, who were malicious practitioners of Heinz Guderian's blitzkrieg method. They followed the aloe to pastures not yet reached and soon my entire back was aflame.

The morning was a haze. I took a Valium, which hardly suppressed the pain but semi-suppressed my ability to remain conscious. Someone in the periphery seemed to be moaning strangely and repeatedly. Only when I lifted my head to look did I realize the sounds were coming from within. At one point, as the lines between anguish and reality blurred, my father entered the room, his phone stretched as far away from his body as possible - the only way that adults of a certain age know how to take a photograph. Around the nation, a half-dozen phones vibrated. The shared family album had been updated.

The pain was too all-encompassing to allow for any distraction. I writhed, I contorted, I screamed - for two hours, all I could do, again and again, was apply cold compresses to my back, each providing a few precious seconds of release from the misery. But by early afternoon, the uneasy concoction of chemicals within my stomach had conspired sufficiently to allow me to pull up Google. My search history is a written record of torment. "Can you take valium and advil"..."Pain meds for sunburn"..."sunburn excruciating pain"..."sunburn skin crawling"...and finally, "remedies for hell's itch."

MedicalNewsToday - an esteemed source, naturally - was the first to tell me that I was special, which I, of course, have always known. "In rare cases," the website reads, "people with sunburn may also experience an extreme, deep, painful itching called hell's itch." You cannot understand the depth of my gratitude for this diagnosis, no matter how much it sounded like a highly contagious STD. I had hell's itch, you see, and it would subside within 24-72 hours. Three more days of this pain was unimaginable - but at least it was finite. Yes, the suffering was inextinguishable, yes, one of the primary side effects of the condition was suicidal ideation - but like all things, one day it would end.

By the afternoon - defying MedicalNewsToday's sagacious forecast - my case of Hell's Itch (also known as 'devil's itch’ and, horrifyingly, 'suicide itch') had faded into a faint hum. It made a staid effort at a comeback in the evening - I fell asleep in a bed damp with the memory of a dozen feverishly applied cold compresses - but by the next morning, it was a quiet vibration, one of a dozen minor pains that throb at any given moment. I felt well enough to get a cavity filled at noon, by evening I was drinking with friends in Boerum Hill.

How to describe these eighteen hours of affliction? It is certainly the closest I have come to holding my mortality in my hands, save for the time I ate a whole bag of frozen mango in one sitting and induced a nasty case of pancreatitis. I now fear nature and the sun's ferocity in a way that feels appropriate and adult. I cower before the wisdom of my sunscreen-applying friend, and vow never again to demean her coaxing efforts as "vain, Big Skincare propaganda." Mostly, I am grateful - grateful to have a back that does not feel like it has been freshly seared on a hibachi grill, grateful to have family willing to coat themselves in various ointments for my benefit, and grateful above all for the beautiful, amber tan that is beginning to emerge.