Mango, Mango, Poison Mango!?! Morgan’s Story

Mango, Mango, Poison Mango!?! Morgan’s Story

Published August 12, 2013

I bought a couple of mangos at the grocery store the first Friday in July. They looked beautiful.  On the following Wednesday afternoon, as the mangos were still available, my youngest son Morgan decided to eat one of them. I am pretty sure that he rinsed the mango under the faucet but he didn’t wash the outside of the fruit very well.  Morgan proceeded to cut off little slices and gnawed the fruit off the peel like you would if you were eating an orange slice off the peel.  Well I was busy doing something so I didn’t ask him to save me a slice and he ate the whole mango himself in a short time.  He had enjoyed every single bite of the mango.

Fast forward to the later part of Thursday afternoon and Morgan started getting blistery like bumps on his lips.  At first I thought that he may have somehow gotten fever blisters.  But my husband and I took a flashlight and looked closer at the blisters; they looked like poison ivy blisters.  We decided that maybe he had accidently allowed himself to be smacked in the mouth with poison ivy as he was running to catch up with his cross country running team on Wednesday evening.  I had him put aloe Vera gel on his lips before he went to bed.

When Morgan woke up the next morning his lips were two to three times the size of normal.  I began thinking, ‘What’s going on here–when he gets poison ivy it is usually only in localized patches.’  So I went to the trusty Google search and searched ‘how to treat poison ivy on the lips.’  The second choice on the list of the search was called ‘Mango Poison?’  I clicked on the link and sure enough I had found the culprit.  Come to find out mangos and their leaves have the same urushiol  oils as poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac.  So no wonder his lips swelled up two to three times larger than normal.

So now that we knew what was going on we had to decide what we needed to do for him and the “MANGO POISONING!” But that will be in my next blog post.  Be sure to leave your comments.  I will be glad to read them.

Thanks,  The BarleyLady Renee G.