… I am LobsterBoy.
Went canoeing down the Jordan River Sunday (Michigan’s first designated Wild and Scenic River. I highly recommend it to all - it’s good for the soul.)
Anyway … I am now terribly sunburned. I mean, the kind of sunburn that putting aloe vera on it is sort of like sending in the Bahamian Navy against the U.S. Atlantic Fleet.
Talk about uncomfortable.
(Hey, it may be mundane and pointless to YOU …)
I’ve gotten one really bad sunburn in my life. On Spring Break, back when I was 19, six of us piled into my friend Russell’s Ford Taurus station wagon and went to, among other places, Myrtle Beach. We spent about five hours on the beach one day. I am fair-skinned, so I slathered on sunscreen about every 30 minutes.
It didn’t do a damn bit of good.
About two hours later, I started getting the shakes, and feeling really queasy. And feverish. Turns out, this was probably a mild case of sun poisoning, which in and of itself is a mild case of radiation poisoning. Everyone else went out to dance that night, and I stayed in bed, burning up but shivering nonetheless. I doubt I need to mention how red my skin was at this point. Someone took pity on me and bought me some aloe gel. This becomes important later.
The next day, we drive home. 12 hours. I somehow manage to eat some breakfast, but I’m definitely feeling like ass. After that, we all pile in the station wagon to head home, not before I liberally apply aloe vera gel to my entire body.
The first thing you must realize is that six people in a Ford Taurus station wagon, along with all their personal effects for a week’s vacation, plus a giant cooler, makes for a REALLY crowded car. There was barely room to move at all. The second thing you must realize is that when aloe vera gel dries, it becomes quite sticky. The third thing you must realize is that I was wearing clothes.
Yep, you guessed it. The first time we hit a rest stop and got out to stretch, my clothes had STUCK to my horribly painfully sunburned skin. I had to quite literally peel them off. I normally have a quite high pain tolerance, but that was just God-awful. Imagine having a horrible sunburn, then covering a good portion of your body in a giant bandaid and ripping it off. I was nearly in tears. It didn’t help that all of my friends were laughing at me.
Two weeks later, after I finally had recovered from the sunburn, I got the chicken pox. Needless to say, that was NOT a fun time in my life.
I feel your pain, Milo.
A few hints, from the Florida chick who’s seen her fair share of cooked yankees…
Take some aspirin. It helps with the inflammation.
There’s a product out called Ocean Potion Instant Burn Relief Ice, which has tea tree extract and lidocaine mixed with aloe vera gel. Works wonders, let me tell you, though it is sticky, and you have to apply it every 15 minutes or so.
Apply lotion liberally and often. It’ll help cut down on some of the peeling.
Promise God you’ll devote every Saturday to working in your local soup kitchen if he takes away the pain. Hey, it could work, you never know…
Thanks for the tips. I’d heard about the aspirin thing, and took a couple last night. Hard to tell if it made any difference.
Drain – I hear ya. This is far from the first (or, probably, worst) sunburn I’ve had. I’ve had the clothes-stick incident occur before as well, and there’s not much worse. That can, in fact, happen if you don’t have aloe on, as your skin just becomes kind of moist and weepy from the burn itself.
Worst burn ever was probably summer 1993, after about 12 hours in the sun at Lollapalooza. I’ll never make fun of people who put zinc oxide on their noses again.
There is absolutely no sunburn on the face of the earth worse than a Myrtle Beach sunburn. I know exactly what you went through Drain. Anyone that you talk to that’s ever been burned on the beach there says the same thing. They’ve even developed some kind of cream that you can buy there at the beach just for the sunburn. If you can find something to stop that pain you have found a treasure.
I don’t know why, but it’s a different kind of sunburn.
The thing with sun poisoning is once you have it one time, you’ll always have it to a degree. I can take three days at the beach in the sun for a limited time, after that the blisters appear and I can’t take any more sun. It’s terrible. No tanning bed or sun for me.
FYI - if you have a history of sun poisoning, you should be aware that there are drugs (chloroquine is one) that you can take in a day or two before an expected sun exposure to prevent or reduce future sun poisoning.
It might not hurt to have a small supply on hand. Don’t plan on seeing a doc before every excursion. You’ll probably forget.
Ouch. Can’t top Drain and Milossarian, but you know what else is fun? A sunburned scalp. Hoo boy. Flash back to my college orientation field trip: I put my sunscreen on, put my shades on, neglect to wear a hat because I was young and stupid. I’ve always kept my hair pretty long, and leaving it down in the summer is pure torture… but so was pulling it up into a pony tail when my scalp was a nice, bright pink.
Oh, and my own mother laughed at me. Thanks, Mom.
From past experience, I think vinyl-stick is right up there on the pain index. 
One summer, I made the mistake of falling asleep on my stomach on an overcast day. My back was covered, but the backs of my legs were not - and ended up an alarmingly bright, almost bubble-gum pink. You could easily feel the heat coming off my legs from a distance of 3 inches. I could barely bend my legs, because the skin above and below my knees would get stuck together.
Later that night, getting dressed for dinner was a torture. The skirt I put on first felt like sandpaper across my legs, and jeans were out of the question, so I went with shorts. Of course, my friends picked a restaurant with vinyl-covered benches that were positioned very close to the (immovable) table… it hurts me still just to think about how long it took to peel myself off the bench after dinner, all the while wondering how much skin I was leaving behind.
Of course, my friends thought it was just so funny. Bastards.
About ten or eleven years ago, I went to Florida, on a vacation with my dad & stepmother, my brother, my stepsister and one of her friends, and my fiance (who later became my ex-husband. I’ll call him D.) We all drove down there in a huge Ford Econoline van (my current husband now owns this van, but that’s not important to the story).
D and I are both fair-skinned, so we spent the whole week slathering on the SPF 25 & 30. It worked. In fact, it worked so well that by the day before we were supposed to leave, neither of us had any kind of color. No tan, no sunburn. Looked like we’d never left Michigan. So what do we do? Switch to SPF 4, just for a day. All togthether now–“You idiot!”
We both got horrible sunburns, front and back. The worst was in the crease of the upper thigh, where the leg joins the hip, the front and back of my knees, the tops of my feet, where the foot bends, and the backs of my thighs. Oh, did I mention that this was the day before we had to leave Florida? And that we drove?
You’ll notice that all the parts of me (and D, by the way) that got burned the worst are the parts that are essential to sitting. We had to ride in a van, from Florida to Michigan, with these sunburns.
What did I learn? I have never used anything less than SPF 25, and if I feel I have to prove I went on vacation somewhere, I’ll buy a freaking T-shirt.
Get some Vitamin E cream: the hardcore stuff from GNC, or a similar vitamin/supplement store. It’ll burn like hell, but you don’t have to apply it as often as the stuff Jezebel mentioned.
After one of my worst sunburns, someone suggested I try vinegar. I don’t think it has actual healing properties, as aloe and vitamin E certainly do, but I don’t think it could hurt, either, and it felt very good. Soak a soft cloth in vinegar and lay it on the affected area. When you take it away the skin feels wonderfully cool.