I’m a concrete pump operator and I literally wanna cover myself up with concrete and die. “Currently dealing with hell’s itch at work. “I feel as if there are fire ants crawling underneath my skin and they are pissed off … this is the worst pain I’ve ever had, and that includes breaking my collarbone.” There, every few hours someone was posting symptoms just like mine. Holding my phone out of the water, I managed a Google search for “something irritated sunburn crazy” which lead me to a solution: a subReddit dedicated to “acute, unimaginable itching that occurs in short, intense waves … two to three days after a reasonably mild (non-blistering) sunburn” also known as “hell’s itch”. When I got back home I went straight back to an ice cold shower. My next stop was the pharmacy for aloe and hydrocortisone, the trip that resulted in me becoming the kind of man that parents pull their children away from. But as soon as I got out, the pain returned – worse than before. In that moment, I finally truly understood the meaning of the verb “writhe”. I ran a freezing cold shower and started contorting my body to get the stream of cold water to whack the mole of each new itch. But that made things worse – as though I had reached for a bandage and somehow come back with a blowtorch. My first instinct was to reach for the Sudocrem – a toothpaste-thick antiseptic cream which is good for burns, and which I already had on hand. I contorted and twisted my body while it spread like a volcano erupting under my skin. I was working out in my bedroom when I started to get the most intensely painful itch I’ve ever experienced. Then, 48 hours after the initial burn, something changed. My skin stung slightly when I took a shower later, but I’ve had sunburn before and it’s always been fine. It was already 3pm, I told myself – it would probably be fine. After a swim, I did my best to reapply, but I couldn’t quite reach a few spots and – generous soul that I am – I didn’t want to force my friends to negotiate the forests of my back hair. Two days earlier, I had gone to the beach armed with my usual two bottles of sunscreen.
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