V i c k i
L a w e r e n c e
I n t e r v i e w
Gary Barg: Vicki Lawrence, as a child of the
sixties and a major fan of your work on The Carol
Burnett show, I’m quite tickled to be talking with
you today.
Vicki Lawrence: Thank you for being tickled.
Gary Barg: I’m always intrigued when I learn
about a new and mysterious health challenge.
I appreciate you sharing the information about
Chronic Idiopathic Urticaria (CIU) with us.
Vicki Lawrence: I’m definitely an overachiever,
because CIU usually gets women between 25 and
40, I believe–it hits women twice as often as it does
men–of course, I always maintain that women get to
do almost all of the fun stuff more than the men do.
I was diagnosed about ten years ago, I woke up one
morning with the palms of my hands itching; I thought that
was kind of funny. My husband was already downstairs
watching the news, so I went downstairs. I laughed, I said,
“You better buy a lottery ticket, honey. Because, obviously,
we’re coming into a lot of money tonight, because my
palms are itching like crazy.”
Anyway, after we had a good laugh, I thought, “Okay,
this is really irritating. What do you do for your hands that
are itching?” And I thought, “Well, what would a mother
do for some sort of an allergic something? Put it in ice
water.” So, I did that. The itching went away, and I didn’t
think much about it until later that morning when I’m out
walking the dog. And all of a sudden, I start itching; my
chest, my stomach, my abdomen, my hips, and the more
you touch it, the worse it gets.
Gary Barg: What happened next?
I told my husband and we went to our allergist, who we
have known for years. And he said, “Almost everybody
breaks out in hives at some point in their lives.” He said,
“We would get it under control. Don’t worry about it; it
happens to everybody and normally, it goes away and
never comes back.”
We did everything you can think of for an allergic reaction
for six weeks, back and forth to the doctor because the
hives keep coming back. They would start as little bumps
and then merge together and turn into little islands, and
then the islands would merge together and turn into
continents. I remember, at one point, thinking, “I wonder
if my skin would ever look like my skin again.” And I asked
any number of other doctors what they thought and got
no answers.
One night, we were having friends over for dinner and my
friend said, “It’s the red wine; you have to stop drinking
red wine, it’s got the tannins in it.” He said, “At the very
least, you have to switch to the French, they don’t do the
thing with the tannins like we do.” We were laughing and
I thought, “My god, I think the red wine is the only thing
getting me through this.”
16 TODAY’S CAREGIVER MAGAZINE • CAREGIVER.COM