Feel the Burn

My mother is 100% Italian. My father, a 100% Irish. My brother got my mother’s olive skin tone: the two of them could sit outside for hours, lathering up in baby oil and bake to a beautiful golden brown. I was the fortunate one (insert sarcastic undertone here) who got my father’s Irish skin. The two of us can’t go to a windy afternoon baseball game without using SPF 45, unless of course, we want to find ourselves covered in sunburn and blisters.

Last summer, I thought I was invincible when it came to the sun. My friends can get tan with SPF 4 or 8, so why couldn’t I? On two various occasions, I felt the effects of not listening to the realistic side of my brain in terms of summer sunshine. I spent a week in June in San Antonio, Texas, where it was roughly 95 degrees every day. As this was a more family-oriented – go out to dinner, do family related things – sunbathing took a back seat, until the last dreaded day, when I thought it was appropriate to lay at the pool, for three solid hours, with nothing – and I mean, not a drop of sunscreen – on my body.

After a few hours, I ran to the bathroom, out of the sunlight, and got a load of myself: completely toasted, head to toe (Did I mention I didn’t flip over, so my back side was ghost white and my front side was cherry red?). The plane ride home was torture, even in a tshirt and spandex pants I was in excrutiating pain, had the shakes and was nauscous – not to mention, my body was giving off enough heat that people started calling me a human radiator. I got home and proceeded to cry and lie on the tile in my bathroom, naked, until I passed out covered in Aloe.

The following day, I thought it was appropriate – after being in Texas and gorging for a solid week – to get on my treadmill and go for a run. No sooner did I break the first mile that I looked down at my stomach and noticed the sunburn had swelled into tiny blisters all over my body, which – once they died down – peeled and turned my skin into a lovely purple color, for two solid weeks. Lesson learned: Wear sunscreen at all times.

A few months later, after telling myself I had learned my lesson, flew to my house in South Carolina for a week, where I proceeded to use 15 SPF instead of 45 SPF like my white behind should’ve. I wound up with a heat rash that landed me in the Emergency Walk-In Clinic and, after a shot of cortisone steroids in my rear end, antibiotics and another round of steroids, I landed myself on my couch, watching trashy television, while everyone else got to play in the pool. Lesson learned: Wear the RIGHT type of sunblock for your skin.

Despite the intense pain sunburn brings, there are long-term repercussions for not taking care of your skin in the warm weather, aka skin cancer. So, lather up in the right stuff and enjoy catching those rays in a healthy way, otherwise, you could wind up lying on the bathroom floor like me.