Done that, too (not the poison oak, thank the Lord). I got my Oaf’s Club membership card years ago. 
Hey all, here’s a true story for you;
A friend of mine once gave his girlfriend a shoulder rub, in a bar, after consuming large amounts of a Certain Irish Brown Liquid. He’d been using some Red Tiger Balm (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a deeply penetrating, heat activating topical used for sore muscles and light injuries) on her poor poor muscles. Then he went to pee.
Without washing.
Took about ten minutes, he got uncomfortable, got jumpy, started sweating, then muttering, then swearing. The rest of us were worrying about him when his girlfriend (she’s not anymore) burst into hysterical laughter, slapped him on the back and told the rest of us -in a voice that could be heard across the street- precicely what had happened.
He was helpless with pain (tiger balm lasts about an hour on back muscles, imagine how if felt on something… uh… softer) and we, of course, refused to drive him home. He sat there, drinking an awful lot, sweating profusely, frightening the other bar partons with his beet-red face, and unusual sitting posture (legs wide, pants held open, lips pursed to blow soothing air into his crotch.)
Even better, at the end of the night someone passed the jar of Tiger Balm to him with the lid not quite on right, so he reseated the lid and then rubbed his eyes… thirty seconds later… I imagine you get the idea.
Mark
how low can we go..let’s see…I’ll bring it down just ONE more notch…I recall a story my buddy told me about…
he and another couple were “camping” at a cabin up nort’ (that’s what we Minehsodans call Northern MN…they were playing poker and eating jalapeno poppers…eventually they shuffled off to their rooms for sleep…well..one couple tried to sleep..the other..well.they went to bed. …I’ll skip the gory details..but imagine the other couple’s fear, surprise and later..humor..at hearing screams…first of pleasure, then mindless pain passing through the cabin…they ran to the kitchen to find the screams..yep…the young lady was perched atop the sink, wearing only what God gave her, using the sink and the dish-hose (whatever it’s called..the sprayer) to try to rid herself of the jalapeno oil that had gotten someplace it shouldn’t have via a rather “interesting” route..
This one time at bandcamp…A senior who had managed to be unpopular enough to go through initiation pranks each year was the unlucky recipent of a smear of Icy-Hot placed on the crotch of the shorts he had hanging on the post of his bunk. He made it through breakfast and out on to the marching field before the ointment started taking effect. 
I’ve also heard of someone mistaking a tube of Bengay for Preparation-H.
Another camp prank was to sprinkle powdered sugar on someone’s bedsheets. For all practical purposes, it’s undetectable, and in the morning the sweet dreamer is very stuck to the linens.
Just wondering…if I’m sensitized to blackwood, does it follow that I’ll have a reaction to cocobolo?
Nope. Blackwood (grenadillo) and Cocobolo are from two different families. A reaction to one doesn’t guarantee a reaction to the other.
Not everyone reacts to cocobolo by touch, but by inhaling the fine sawdust when working the wood. I know Joe Kennedy got sick several times from working in cocobolo before he figured out what was the cause.
djm
Hmmm? African blackwood is Dalbergia Melanoxylon, Cocobolo is Dalbergia Retusa. At least in the states. Same genus here, Dalbergia containing the true “rosewoods.” Isin’t “Grenadillo” a synonym for black ebony in some places, though? Genus Diospyros, that. Cocobolo is the most notorious for making you look like this little guy: 
Arrgh! Shiver me timbers.
Kevin beat me to the punch. Yep, djm, I was going to mention that they’re actually pretty closely related, both being Dalbergia rosewoods. So, reaction to one might very well mean you’d react to another.
ALL of the rosewoods have been implicated in allergy. There’s a not-all-that-small proportion of folks who are allergic to blackwood. Most instrument mouthpieces, remember, aren’t timber, but are either plastic (in the case of the clarinet) or reed (with oboe). Blackwood headjoints are a really small proportion of the whole. Hand-skin is thick enough that some people never notice a reaction to holding blackwood.
And Kevin, I don’t think cocobolo is the most notorious; cocus (Brya ebenus) would win that contest hands down.
Oh, yeah. Grenadilla is blackwood is Dalbergia melanoxylon. Grenadillo doesn’t mean anything, really; the other term is granadillo which is Maracaibo ebony sometimes . . . or cocobolo . . . or dark partidgewood. I don’t like grenadilla as a term because it can be so misleading.
And as long as we’re being all scientific and stuff . . . the species name is NEVER capitalized. NEVER never. We’re Homo sapiens sapiens, and nice old flutes are Brya ebenus. Or, if you want to be hypoallergenic, Buxus sempervirens.
Stuart
Thanks, guys. I stand corrected. I had always understood the term African Blackwood was grenadilla, but since I’ve never been there, I could be easily led astray. 
The book I was using had a different latin name, but I can no longer find it to confirm.
djm
DJM, I bet what you saw was the Latin name for the other grana-grena-dillo whatever. That probably explains the confusion.
Which comes back to why I hate the term.
Stuart