baked

I am baked, and not in the fun way, but in the way that I can't let one leg touch the other, or wear long pants, or move too quickly. The Sunday sun roasted me like a chicken on a spit, and I'm the idiot that let it happen. But it was cloudy... I whined to my husband that night, who had also turned a teenage girl-approved shade of magenta, but I knew better. By the fourth inning of the game, I was already pinkish, and I threw on my cardigan backwards to cover my chest and arms. Finally in the 6th, a friend showed up with some SPF 15, but too little, too late. The damage was done.

I missed work yesterday-- how does one shower when one can hardly stand on the two crispy sticks formerly known as legs? I couldn't figure that out, and it hurt to move, so I got back in bed. On my back with no blankets. I worked from home, laying flat on the couch with my laptop on my stomach, only moving my legs to fix food or let the dog out. Last night was better, and today is better again. I am at work, in a cotton skirt that barely brushes my legs when I walk, which is not often since that's the only thing that still hurts to do. So far I've been called a "lobster," a "tomato," and a "strawberry," but I really feel more like boiled meat.

My legs, which don't look as red in this photo as they do in real life...

We spent a week every summer at the beach when I was a kid. My father is an attorney by trade (not necessarily by choice), and the bar convention holds its annual meeting on the Florida panhandle coast every July. By the time I was ten or eleven, we all knew you had to bathe me in sunscreen to keep me from getting burned, and any exposed skin-- a part in the hair, a ring around my waistband, a rouge toe-- was going to get burned, and bad. I guess my body had had enough at 15 because when my arms got burned that summer (a crazy burn too, I had a faint hand-print on my left shoulder from where I thought I had rubbed in lotion, but you know how attentive 15-year-olds are), I got sun poisoning. My arms itched so bad I sobbed the whole way home. I had to go to the emergency room and get a steroid shot. At age 17, after a sailing field trip with my geometry class (don't ask me what one has to do with the other), again my arms got fried. At this point I learned SPF 15 was no longer enough. The itching started again, and I got another shot.

This isn't just dry-skin-itch, either. The doctor said it's more like nerve damage, that the nerve endings in the burnt areas are all thinking "itch, itch, itch" as they're healing. It feels like bugs are crawling and biting and stinging me all at once, and the only thing that stops it is constant rubbing so I feel something else. It's miserable. Don't tell me about skin cancer, I know all about it. I don't burn in order to avoid this itch. It's much more present-tense.

Since that last time, I've behaved. I bathe in SPF 45 if I know I'm going to be in the sun for even 20 minutes. The worst I've gotten since then was the little curve around my hairline on my forehead on my honeymoon-- that Mexican sun is hot. Every baseball season I buy a new bottle of 45, and by the end of the season, two months later, it's gone. I hadn't bought my bottle yet this year, and since it was cloudy and only in the 70s on Sunday, I just didn't think about it, until it was too late.

Me, sneakily taking a snapshot with my Mac at work today. You can see the line between red and pale on my chest here. So glad I had my cardigan, or this would have been as bad as my legs.

So far, no itching, and fingers crossed, it won't come. Just thinking about itching makes me think I'm itching. It's a vicious cycle.