Beware Jalapenos!

I will never, repeat NEVER, cook with jalapenos without the proper use of gloves again. Here’s why…
It was balmy Memorial Day, or Labor Day, whichever one comes at the beginning of the summer, and I was visiting my family back home. We—and by we I mean my family—had a huge gathering planned. My family does this. A lot. My parents own a restaurant, so large parties with tons of food are common place. So, we have this huge cook-out/swim party planned and since my cooking skills are rather pathetic in comparison to just about every other adult in my family—You know what, scratch that. I might as well admit it. I'm the worst cook in my family. Needless to say, I’ve never worked a day behind counter of previously mentioned restaurant Don’t feel bad for me. I really don't mind being on the receiving end of all that good food. So, I decided to help prepare one of the side dishes. You know, stay safely away from anything I could render inedible. You may think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. I've screwed up Hamburger Helper before. Don't ask me how, I don't know.
Anyway, my safe option—or so I thought at the time—was to help prepare Stuffed Jalapenos. Halved and seeded jalapenos, stuffed with cream cheese, wrapped in thick-sliced bacon, then grilled. Is your mouth watering yet? So my sister and I are moving along, prepping up peppers. No big deal, right? Yeah, that's what I thought until we started coughing. The fumes from the peppers we were slicing and deseeding were irritating our throats. We’d never had that experience prepping peppers before and we’ve made this dish several times if not on such a large scale. We probably had about thirty large jalapenos to prep. The coughing might have been our first clue, but we were almost done and didn't think much of it. A little later, just as we were finishing, my hands start to heat up. Uncomfortably. Still thinking nothing of it, I wash them off and keep going. Within minutes my fingers are searing; my palms and the skin underneath my nails is on fire.
Now I've worked with peppers before. I've made this dish before, with no problems whatsoever, but apparently this specific batch of peppers had something to prove. I tried washing my hands again, didn't work. I scrubbed them with the gritty stuff you use to make your feet soft. That only made it worse. Aloe Vera Gel, the kind used on sunburns, that was bad news also. Finally, I found that if I kept my hands in a bowl of ice water, it numbed the heat. Unfortunately, it also numbed my fingers and then I had to deal with the pain of defrosting digits. I spent the whole party alternating between the searing pain of a first degree burn and the half-frozen stinging sensation you get from playing in the snow too long. I was the life of the party that day, let me tell you.
Taking pity on me, my wonderful brother-in-law (love ya, Trey) offered to search for some remedies online. You would be amazed at how many normally intelligent individuals have made the mistake of brawling bare-handed with proud peppers. I would have been laughing at the comments we found... if I weren't agonizingly distracted at the time. We came across every remedy you could think of. One person would post a remedy, then the next person would reply, sometimes in all caps, whether the remedy worked for them or not. (Usually, the all caps meant not.) After several pages of this hilarity, we found something that looked useful, baking soda.
You see, the culprit in this scenario was the capsaicin oil in the peppers. Once that oil gets into your pores it does not want to come out. At least not without letting you know about it, loudly. After scrubbing my hands with the baking soda, the heat would diminish for a few minutes, but while that did alleviate the pain, it was tedious and my hands were raw already. Exasperated, I made a paste out of the stuff and coated my hands in it. Ah, finally relief...until it dried. And started flaking off everywhere on everything, but at least I wasn’t burning up anymore. I had to sleep with my hands coated in baking soda that night. As long as I left the baking soda on my hands—and a good thick coating of it I might add—it absorbed the oil as it left my pores. By morning my hands felt more or less normal with only residual heat detectable under my nails.
I have learned my lesson. So if the next time I’m with family and I go a little manic about proper pepper prepping procedures, you'll know why.