The story actually begins February 22, 2006, but I really didn’t want to ruin such a great title by being picky. It begins with the day I received a GPS for my birthday and became a geocacher. As a geocacher, I became obsessed with the idea of leaving no cache unfound. I couldn’t consider passing one up. I would take my dogs to the hills for hikes and bushwack or do what it took to claim the find.
Enter poison oak. I had gotten poison oak a couple of times after owning the woods for many years, thinking that I was immune. Well, you know the school of thought that says the more you are exposed to it, the worse your allergy becomes? I am a believer. It started with getting a rash in an area of contact and later became something that spread quickly to areas of my body that were completely covered. Not only that, but I became so sensitive that I would have no direct contact with it, wipe my dogs down when I got home and I would still get it. My favorite story is that I did brush against it and got it through my shirt. I washed the shirt and I got it again. This actually happened 4 more times until I washed it with tecnu (it was one of my favorite shirts) and could again wear it without consequence. (Tecnu really is amazing, folks. Apparently, nobody really knows why it works. But IMHO, it is a miracle. If I know I have been exposed to PO and wash immediately with when I get home, I do NOT get a rash!)
In late 2007, I did a bunch of web research about building immunity since I could not imagine giving up geocaching or hiking in the hills. Being in the hills for long, sometimes all day walks was part of my identity; it is what I did for myself to feel like myself. I began taking rhus tox homeopathically on my own.
Along the way, I had seen the webpage for a local homeopath who treated poison oak. When I saw his name again in a Sierra Club magazine, I decided to make the call. He was fantastic, but unfortunately…it didn’t work. We tried everything and it only seemed to get worse. I decided the only thing that I could do was cold turkey it. No more hills at all. I wasn’t going to be exposed and neither were my dogs.
Meanwhile, I had several other skin outbreaks that I assumed were a fungus. They were itchy and scaly (some areas worse than others). I treated them as such and put anti-fungal cream on. Ate endless raw garlic, grapefruit seed extract and mostly cut sugars out. It, too ONLY GOT WORSE! I had treated fungus on my own several times, so I knew something was amiss. I was at my wits end at this point and went to a dermatologist. He felt it was a clear cut case of psoriasis. He took a biopsy (this is now sometime in 2008) and since things like this are never really simple for me, it went through a number of different tests because it did show markers of a rare kind of lymphoma. In the end, they decided that it was psoriasis and the steroid cream that they prescribed worked. The dermatologist said that psoriasis can run many different courses in people and that it was very common for someone my age getting it for the first time to just go away again.
End of story? Of course not.
I never really thought of myself as vain until I got a rash on my face. For most of 2009, my face was somewhere between dry- irritated and swollen- red-oozing. I was very surprised how much it disturbed me and how self-conscious I became. Using a topical steroid would help, but only for a week or so. Eventually, my skin became reactive to metal, I had trouble wearing my glasses and my wedding ring. Although psoriasis typically spares the face, my dermatologist and I both attributed my issues to that, for lack of any better explanation.
I tried a few things to help including changing my facial products and accupuncture, but when my face was better, it didn’t seem to last long and I was beginning to feel more dependent on steroids. I began to wonder if what I was dealing with was eczema and not a product of psoriasis. I thought back to all of they lifestyle and diet changes that I have underwent about the same time that I started having issues with my face. After a bit of research I found this:
The most common food triggers for eczema are eggs, milk, peanuts, soy, and wheat. Among these, eggs are probably associated the most strongly with eczema.
Well, I hate to give such a complicated story a anti-climatic ending, but I think I am allergic to eggs. About two weeks ago, I eliminated them from my diet almost completely and my skin has been remarkably improved. It is still too soon to tell whether it will stay improved, but it has not felt this good in some time, especially for this long of a time.
