Day 38 – “Stress Detox” 5/7

Well, I’ve put the speech marks in there today because the stress detox essentially isn’t happening. On day 38 I had a 2.5 hour evening flight, and had a monumental of stuff to prepare before leaving, so it was just madness. Huge, huge, huge amounts of stress, seemingly unavoidable.

BUT…no scratching. On a flight my skin tends to dry out but I don’t tend to scratch… I wonder if this is because on a flight there isn’t much to think about – I start scratching when I am confronted with multiple things to think about and feel like I can’t find solutions to problems, but on a plane the only problem is turbulence, and although some deep breathing tends to be necessary it isn’t a problem that needs processing.

By contrast, this morning (it’s now Day 39, technically) when I woke up I immediately had a problem – I was trying my best not to scratch (I tend to want to scratch a lot the moment I wake up), then I found out my girlfriend had not been able to bring a nice unperfumed skin-friendly soap, and that if I had a shower I was going to miss breakfast, and that I wanted to send some early emails, and there isn’t anything good on TV…and then suddenly there was too much to process, and the scratching started. Interesting how the psychology affects the scratching.

Where I am staying – in a relatively disconnected part of Romania – the diet thing is going to be borderline impossible to maintain. This morning at breakfast I had a bit of cucumber and tomato (good), muesli with oats (good) and nuts (bad, if the RAST test is to be taken seriously), omelette (OK), white bread (not so good), salami (not so good), a tiny bit of cheese (bad)… Maybe I’ll be able to have a more vegetable-orientated lunch. My skin has a lot of repairing to do…

Oh yeah, in spite of the post-wedding outbreak on Day 36, I haven’t actually used any steroids since Day 35. I am contemplating using some Hydrocortisone today though, at least on the bottom of my back which is currently a disaster area…