Getting Better After Being Hospitalised for Eczema Herpeticum

Thought I better check back in to tell you how I'm doing. Well I haven't rebounded thank goodness! I'm still taking the Antibiotics and Aciclovir and taking it easy. I went to see my derm nurse on Monday and she said I was doing fantastically well. I've also changed dermatologist as I'm just not gonna get anywhere with this steroid withdrawal business with the one I'm currently with. The lady I've swapped to is much more open minded so fingers crossed we get somewhere!

Tomorrow I go back to make sure I am still on the mend - which I know fine well I am so it's a bit of a pointless appointment. Though, we only made it just to be sure I don't need to extend my sick note for work. It'll be nice to get back to normal as I haven't even left the house this week apart from going to see various doctors.

My skin has been doing incredibly well considering I'm still off the Ciclosporin. I just assume that the antibiotics are helping to keep it at bay. The heat has been awful though and I have been really itchy too but thankfully I haven't completely destroyed myself through scratching, though I have been unable to control myself and am consequently covered in scratches and red patches. My face is rather unscathed though. 

I ended up having to take pictures on my phone as for some reason my camera, no matter how the settings were adjusted, made my face look super bright red, but it isn't. The colour is much more of a match with these pictured below.

  Yayyy! The redness is subsiding...


That is until I put my hand next to my face and I can see that actually I still have a hell of a way to go before I can be considered my normal colour. Sigh. (But I do rejoice my white arm!)


I'll get there one day. We all will :)
xxx

Summer Days: Eczema (Warning: Deep Post)

So the sun is shining, the last couple of days have been serene and beautiful... but I'm not allowed to enjoy it... according to my skin anyway!

I envy those people who's eczema gets better in the sun shine weather. Mine just gets worse and worse. Everything about the sunny weather just destroys me. The heat is too much that I get itchy and irritable and come out in hives; the abundance of UV rays means high factor sun cream which dries out my poor skin; not to mention the emergence of insects that act as irritants! It's bad enough to near-constantly feel as though I have millions of tiny insects crawling all over my body, but to have it actually happen makes that sensation all the worse!

I find myself tearing my poor skin to shreds because I just cannot get comfortable. Summer is literally hell on earth for me but I wish it wasn't. I want nothing more than to enjoy soaking some of the sun up through my Vitamin D deficient skin but those times are just distant memories, what with now taking immunosuppressants that make the risks of getting the likes of skin cancer that much greater.

I yearn for my youth for when I could paddle in the sea on a summers day, without feeling the sheer agony of sea salt driving itself into fresh wounds; for reading a good book in the sun trap that is the garden; for going on sun lit adventures; and most earnestly to just feel god damn comfortable in my own sodding skin.

I miss being normal.

I think that's what makes it worse for me. I've always had eczema but I've never suffered from it as much as I suffer now. It was always manageable and easy to rectify. Life gave me a taste of what it is to live but I have so many regrets that I've taken the life I had prior to this for granted. I'll never get back these past few years of my "prime" where I could have really made something for myself. We are only on this earth for a blink of an eye after all.

In short: you can't miss what you've never had, but if you were lucky enough to experience life beforehand make the bloody most of it. Life is too short.