The Night With The Roll-On Lotion

Now, before any of your minds fall too far into the gutter, let me just stop you right there and say, "No...that's not what this post is about".  It involves arthritis medication and there ain't nothin' kinky about arthritis medication.

Over the last little while, Mike's knee has been bothering him more and more.  He's tried a few different remedies, but the pain keeps coming back.  When he was at Wallyworld last week, he spied some arthritis lotion and decided to try it out.  The container looks like a stick of the old school roll-on deodorant.  He rubbed it all over his knee, front and back.  He didn't feel anything right away and decided it didn't really work.  As per usual, Mike went to bed before I did.

My shoulder had really been bothering me that day, so shortly after Mike climbed into bed, I decided to rub some of the lotion on my shoulder and neck.  I didn't feel anything right away either, but the smell of the lotion was pretty noxious.  An hour or so later, Mike got up and said that his knee felt really hot and asked me if the back of his leg was red.  It was.  Big time.  We both figured that the lotion must be reacting with Mike's sweat and causing a bit of a reaction.  We didn't think too much of it and we climbed into bed.

Within an hour, my shoulder and neck were on FIRE.  The pain was incredibly intense...as though someone was holding a torch to my neck.  The pain was coming in waves, almost like contractions.  Flare up, die down, flare up, die down and repeat.  At about 3:30am, I couldn't take it anymore and decided I would counteract this gawd awful medication with some of my ice gel.  Big mistake.  Huge.

I can't even begin to describe the pain I was in...one would think the cold from the ice gel would counteract the heat from the lotion, but you'd be wrong.  The two of them teamed up together to form some sort of super paste that were, apparently, each holding tiny little burning knives that were repeatedly stabbing my skin.  The pain was too much and I decided a shower would help get rid the paste.  That was my third mistake of the evening.

The pressure from the shower head felt like even tinier knives stabbing my shoulder and neck.  If the kids hadn't been sleeping (it was now 4:15am), I literally would have screamed.  When I climbed out of the shower, my shoulder was one welted mess of a red blob.  It was nasty.  BUT...the paste and the pain were gone.  Which means it was now Mike's turn to step into the shower of tiny knives and rinse his leg off.  It was just as painful for him!

When we looked at the directions for the lotion (because reading things beforehand is for pansies), it said that there would be a burning sensation the first few times you used it, but that feeling would eventually disappear.  I can't help but think what dumbass of a test subject used this lotion more than once, instead of alerting the scientist that perhaps something was wrong with it?!?