Mosquitoes are the bane of my outdoor existence. When I step outdoors, the beeper of every mosquito within a ten mile radius goes nuts, letting them know that their favorite meal, ME, is now being served. Apparently my particular body chemistry makes me a very tasty treat indeed. I can be outside with Ritina for an hour and she'll have zero bites to my thirty. I'm the guy that gets invited to backyard barbecues to keep the mosquitoes away from the other guests! I get this vision in my head of ten thousand mosquitoes all taking on little tiny cell phones: "Yeah, he's outside man. Let's go!"
Well, it would be tolerable if the bites didn't itch so darned much! Every year it's the same story with me. The first round of bites don't seem to affect me much. But, after about ten to fifteen bites, I start having a huge reaction. For the next month, any bite swells and itches like mad, and then they seem to calm down again for the rest of the year. During that period when they're bad, though, they can be so distracting that I literally cannot focus on anything else. So, I've tried the gamut of solutions. Everything, honestly. If it supposedly stops a mosquito bite from itching, I've probably tried it.
Well, this year, today is the day the bites started going nuts. The last six or seven bites that I received while mowing yesterday are hot and red and were driving me insane. This drove me to try a new solution. A couple years ago, Ritina contracted poison ivy, and the itch remedy that we discovered worked for her was hot water. Piping hot water, as hot as she could stand it. She'd take a steaming hot twenty minute shower, and for the next eight hours, the itch was gone!
I wondered if this would work for a mosquito bite. We have a handheld sprayer on our shower, so I turned the water on as hot as I could stand it, nearly to the point where it burned but not quite, and I sprayed the bites. At first, this made them itch about one hundred times worse! But, after about thirty seconds of treating them this way, the itch started to subside. For good measure, I kept it up for about six or seven minutes until all the bites were thoroughly cooked, and lo and behold, THE ITCHING IS TOTALLY GONE! I don't mean just relieved a bit like most creams and lotions seem to do, but totally, completely, absolutely gone! These are serious bites, and so far I'm itch-free for about four hours. Woo hoo!
I decided to do a bit of research on how and why this works. After a bit of Googling, I think I've found the answer. I didn't find any references specifically to using this technique with mosquito bites, but the explanation for why it works on poison ivy explains why it also works for mosquito bites.
Ultimately, itching is about histamine, and heat, apparently, stimulates the histamine reaction. Enough heat stimulates enough of a reaction that you can actually fully deplete histamine in your skin on a localized basis. This explains why it itched like crazy at first---the histamine reaction went on high alert!---but why it calmed down and went away: the histamine was totally depleted. And, apparently it takes the body about eight hours to restore enough histamine for the itching to return.
This gave me an idea. I had one mosquito bite on my back that I didn't treat because I was actually dressed at the time and so was only treating my legs. But, if it's heat that's needed, how about a hair dryer? I took my shirt off and, using the mirror, blasted that pesky bite on my back with some nice hot air. Presto! Same reaction. At first, intense itching, and then it subsided and is totally and completely gone.
I know it will be back in eight hours, but hey, it only took me a few minutes to do this, and the investment of my time is well worth the eight hours of relief!
Dedicated to all those of you out there who also happen to be a favorite on the mosquito menu.