Day 51 – Temptation

This is going to be a short one – I’ve got to be up in 7hrs and 7mins, which is already less sleep than I would like. What does it say about the human condition when stress from the potential solution (my lovely blog) contributes to the worsening of the problem (my horrible eczema)?

Well as the title says today…I was lead into temptation. I wanted today to simply be a healing day, a peaceful day. Back on the straight and narrow after my Romania trip where the eczema diet sort-of went out the window. Well, it went well to start with – plenty of water, some nice nettle tea, my sheep’s yoghurt and oat breakfast concoction, salmon with plenty of green veg, potatoes, lemon and mustard (good mustard, not bad mustard) for lunch, two boiled eggs with rye bread and goat’s cheese for dinner. Then at my pub quiz which I go to from time to time the idea was to use sparkling water as usual as my replacement for beer. They didn’t have any. Snookered, I began with an orange juice and soda water, then succumbed to a beer, then managed to make myself drink a pint of tap water, then a second beer. Not exactly straight or narrow.

On the way home, then, I inevitably scratched. But interestingly I controlled it. When I’m spending so much of my time focusing on not scratching, I do feel like I build up nervous energy which is then released all at once if I do start scratching, and I am noticing that although my scratch outbreaks are less frequent than they were they are actually *worse*, perhaps because of the built up tension. Although, perhaps they are worse because of my thought processes…when I’ve spent so much time not-scratching, when I do scratch it feels like the end of the world, and I have a massive tendency to think “fuck it” and just let myself go…but this is avoidable, perhaps. At any rate, when I began scratching on the way home today I kept calm, and whereas normally in a vaguely-drunken scratch attack the scratching would probably have spread everywhere and I would have drawn blood, neither of these things happened. So…success?

Day 50 – Eczema Triggers

For the last month I’ve recorded every time I’ve had a serious scratch outbreak, and noted the triggers beforehand, I list the triggers below.

There are many flaws with this experiment. Any of the triggers I’m not particularly worried about (e.g. onion, potato) I stopped counting reasonably early on, so I suppose you could say the data was incomplete for them. The stats are also warped because I’m supposed to have given up things like beer, so although beer isn’t top of the list I think I can say that it has triggered a scratch attack 6 times out of 6, whereas “eating out” I will have done probably more than 9 times (I was on a holiday for 10 days or so), so that’s less revealing.

So, useful conclusions: alcohol, as predicted, has been implicated in 66% of my scratching outbreaks. I seem to be three times more likely to scratch in the evening than in the afternoon. Sleep deprivation is another big one, and I believe that every time I scratched at night I was already stressed out before sleeping.

Rating my level of stress immediately before every scratching outbreak has been possibly the most interesting thing. I note that I have not scratched at all without being stressed to some degree beforehand. That average of 8.48/10 stress level is a mixture of 8s, 9s, 10s, and a few 7s.

For “High Blood Sugar” I added the “biscuits” and “alcohol” together – I felt able to do this because I consumed all my biscuits during the day, and the alcohol in the evening. I know from talking to a diabetes sufferer that alcohol does weird things to blood sugar (a misleading peak followed by a sharp drop, I understand) so I think it’s reasonable to assume my blood sugar would be particularly high after eating biscuits or drinking alcohol. This, again, seems to be implicated in a very high number of scratching outbreaks.

Well here are the results. Happy to answer any questions about them.

Outbreak Count	29
Stress average at time of outbreak	8.48
Triggers	At the time	At the time + 24hrs before
High Blood Sugar	19
Alcohol	13	20
Evening	12
Eating Out	9	14
Sleep Deprived	9	11
Morning	8
Going to sleep stressed	7
Beer	6	14
Biscuits	6	9
Evening Unwinding	6
Night	6
Vodka	5	9
Eating too late	5
Flight	4	5
Hot	4
Shower	4
Coconut Oil	4
Afternoon	4
Cow’s Milk	3	5
Whisky	3	4
Rich Tea Biscuits	3	4
Bread	3	4
White bread	3	4
Hungry	3	3
Not using emollient (excl coco oil) for more than 18hrs	3	3
Potatoes	3	3
Sleeping when hot	3
Hot shower	3
Sparkling Water	2	7
Garlic	2	2
Glenmorangie	2	2
Teaching	2	2
Nuts	2
Cheese	2
Propolis	1	2
Black Tea	1	1
Guar Gum	1	1
Hangover	1	1
Organic raw garlic	1	1
Oversleeping	1	1
Post-Bar shift	1	1
Strathmore Sparkling Water	1	1
Xanthan Gum	1	1
Onion	1	1
New clothes	1	1
Ginger	1	1
Tomatoes	1	1
Sausage	1	1
Brown sauce	1
Chinese food	0	1
McDonalds		2
CocaCola		2
Caffeine		2
Alfalfa Sprouts		1
Green Tea		1
Kiwi		1
Marijuana		1

 

Day 49 – Gay Pride

As I’ve done the last couple of years I went down to Gay Pride in Brighton yesterday. Not necessarily my idea of a perfect day out, but there is a super atmosphere there and it was a nice chance to catch up with my cousin who lives there.

Eczema-wise, I knew it would be chaos. Trying to find healthy food whilst rushing around following the group we were with on a long-distance pub crawl was almost impossible. I also couldn’t resist the temptation to drink, or to take (a little) marijuana as it was passed round. I’ve noted before that the first time I enter a place (getting home, entering a restaurant, getting on a train…) is always a dangerous time for potential scratching (I don’t know why, perhaps it’s to do with the disorientation of a new place putting my stress level up a bit?) and so a pub crawl would perhaps seem like it would be disastrous in this respect.

How was it? Fine. No scratching, almost none at all.

But…as always…WHY?

1 – The boring reason. I knew the day was going to be a difficult one eczema-wise and used my weakest steroid, Hydrocortisone 1%, for the first time in 5 days, as a preventative measure.

2 – Knowing about the unhealthy times to come, at about 11am I ate a plate full of steamed green vegetables and carrot. Maybe that helped.

3 – I kept my blood sugar under control. I’m now very interested in whether peaks in blood sugar are causing scratching. I dodged all the sweeter alcoholic drinks (except for one jagerbomb…ugh…) and avoided getting cokes etc.

4 – Wishful thinking perhaps, but feeling relaxed under the influence of the marijuana MAY have contributed to me being less inclined to scratch. Perhaps that’s just insane though.

5 – I left early (well, 11ish) so it wasn’t a spectacularly late night.

6 – I made sure I didn’t have to do anything early the next day – I think that worrying about having to get up early to do stuff can lead to me scratching at night.

Today with the hangover etc. I have scratched a bit, but it’s been very controllable. I’ve ate healthily  – my super breakfast recommended by Oracle, followed by an onion-spinach omelette with an avocado, rye bread, houmous, and goats cheese – which has probably helped too. And, of course, no caffeine.

Well that’s about it for yesterday. More later.

Day 48 – Recovery

Horrendous scratching last night left my skin badly damaged this morning.

As the hours went past today and I didn’t feel like scratching I felt less and less inclined to use my Hydrocortisone 1% and allowed the skin to recover peacefully. I used shea butter after a (slightly painful) shower in the AM, then coconut oil at about 17:00 before a nap to recover from my horrendous lack of sleep last night. So far…it worked! No scratching, except the back of my neck, which is a massive success.

Reasons for lack of scratching? I’ve been controlling my blood sugar more carefully than I was when I was in Romania, I’ve forced myself not to get stressed today (even though I got lots done), I ate huge amounts of green veg for lunch, I pre-prepared myself for the damage of yesterday’s flight by stocking up on vitamin C (a bell pepper yesterday, plenty of lemon, a berry smoothie on arrival at Luton airport at 23:00 yesterday…)…no caffeine obviously…didn’t eat too heavily at lunch…yeah, good stuff.

Washed blood-stained bedsheets today – this is the most demoralising sight for me, and causes me real upset. Anyway, better now with these clean ones.

Ahhh starting to scratch now. Right, better go to sleep. Night.

Day 47 – Airplane!

Back on a plane yesterday. Very late flight.

Generally a stressful day, with packing etc. Scratched mid-afternoon because of the stress of packing. Scratched again later in the evening. Had a margarita and a beer before the flight (ill-advised, but I was celebrating…I dunno what…life?)…

After the beer I didn’t scratch at all for a long time, even when the airline made us wait for what felt like an eternity while the plane we were taking arrived and the previous passengers disembarked etc… Got on the plane. As soon as the seatbelt sign went off I went to the bathroom and applied shea butter everywhere. The rest of the flight was scratch free (except for when I got a little stressed during the landing – although this was probably more to do with the book I was reading, which I was struggling to concentrate on), but flights are normally scratch free at the time. The damage is done afterwards.

So, three-hour flight beginning at 22:20 Romanian time. Got into UK at 23:30ish, think we must have made up some time en route. Got a coach reasonably fast to London. Had an outbreak of scratching on the coach, but this was just my elbows and hands and I was reasonably satisfied I contained it.

Because London’s so bloody big and the tubes weren’t running I didn’t get home until 2:30am UK time, which would be 4:30am Romanian time (i.e. my body clock). As I went in I remember thinking “now is a danger time – mustn’t scratch”… Got in, did some essential things, brushed teeth. Got into my room, and saw I’d left it in a terrible mess as I’d left in a massive hurry…and that was it, the final trigger. Cue a huge, damaging scratch outbreak. I was so close…

Eczema is calm this morning, but my skin is very sore. And I only had 4hrs sleep because I had to wake up early. I’m wondering if it’s bad enough to use my Hydrocortisone Ointment 1% as an emergency…right now I think I might leave it one more day before a usage, and then I will have used it only twice in ten days, which is great considering I’ve been boozing and flying.

In my eczema-trigger-monitoring spreadsheet I’ve added up all the scratching outbreaks that could be related to an unusual spike in blood sugar, and found that I’ve had a blood sugar peak in 66% of the outbreaks I’ve monitored. More on this later. Now…sleep…

Day 46 – Pollen

Today I sat working on a terrace for about an hour. Afterwards I had some quite serious yellow allergic spots, which were very itchy, including one alarming one on my lower lip (“herpes?” – inquired my girlfriend, affectionately…). Considering that my histamine levels are likely to be high today after having a beer after a concert yesterday, and having had a similar reaction last time I lay on grass, I reckon the spots were all caused by pollen. Actually, once it was too late, I realised that the pollen was seemingly in a layer on the table I was working on, and must have been falling vigorously from a nearby tree. I could actually see the yellow powder on parts of my skin…

The solution – an antihistamine tablet, in spite of the advice of Donia Alawi (see below). I think I am convinced – I must say – that my allergies are less when my Vitamin C is up (I do think that eating lemons, as opposed to applying lemon juice to the skin, means I am generally less allergic) BUT when I found myself allergic in this way today I didn’t have any natural source of Vitamin C to hand, so what was I to do? The tablet seems to have done the trick, for now.

The sun’s also come out today, so the Vitamin D should be on the way now, but looking at my skin after a bit of sunbathing I think it may have dried it out also, so I’ll be applying coconut oil before I go out tonight.

 

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Donia Alawi on Antihistamine PLEASE NOTE – I take most of this with a massive pinch of salt, the mint tea cooling the body down sounds particularly dodgy:

 

Histamine and Skin Itching

 

Eczema patients have increased levels of histamine. This is the main reason leading to intense skin itching.  Understanding why the body increases histamine levels may convince you not to use antihistamine drugs.

 

What is histamine:

 

Histamine is a neurotransmitter.  It is manufactured from the amino acid histadine.  Histamine secreting nerve cells are located in the hypothalamus. They send their messages for the release of histamine to all parts of the nervous system (Ferril, p. 389). 

 

Causes of increased histamine blood levels:

 

One of the main causes of increased histamine levels in the body is vitamin C deficiency.  “It is now known that the blood histamine level begins to increase as soon as the plasma ascorbic acid or vitamin C concentration falls below the normal level…Blood plasma vitamin C levels and whole blood histamine levels show a remarkable inverse relationship” (Clemetson, p. 112).  Of course many toxins and other factors, including vaccinations and drugs  also cause an increase in the blood histamine level.  The main toxins causing high histamine levels are heavy metal toxins such as mercury and inorganic copper and iron (enriched flour, cooking pots….etc.)

 

What happens in the body when there is high histamine blood levels?

 

The main thing that happens in the body with high levels of histamine is itching,  allergies, capillary fragility and constant coughing or asthma. 

 

What should I do to correct the problem of high histamine levels in my body?

 

1. Ferril believes that the medical model has groomed people to believe that the best approach is to suppress histamine with the use of antihistamine drugs.As a result antihistamine drugs are some of the most popular drugs creating a lot of money for the medical establishment (Ferril, p. 389).

 

Antihistamine drugs may be very profitable, convenient to prescribe and seemingly effective for the short term, but they can create some long-term horrors and eventually can contribute to crippling the immune system further.

 

When you have eczema, you have a hyper immune system and this is why the high levels of histamine production in the body.  Therefore, you don’t want to further cripple your immune system with antihistamine drugs.  There is a better way.

 

You don’t want to suppress histamine in your body in order to stop the itching.  I have read many books written by medical doctors that say that suppressing the histamine levels to get better is a false assumption (Rona, p. 148).  What you should be doing to get well and stop the itching is to balance your histamine levels through diet and supplements.

 

Here’s a list of what you can do to balance histamine levels:

 

• Since increased levels of histamine is associated with a decrease of the antioxidant vitamin C in the body, make sure you eat daily one bell pepper, one orange, one kiwi and take a supplement high in natural vitamin C (food based supplement not the man made isolated ascorbic acid supplement).

 

• Drink a glass of fresh mint tea (buy fresh leaves if you can find them in your local grocery store).Eczema patients have high levels of excessive heat.   Mint is known to reduce excessive heat in the body.  Mint is considered a calming food.

 

• If you can’t sleep at night because of severe itching, take plant based and bromelain enzymes several times at night.In addition add, on a temporary basis only, deglycerrhized licorice root.  “Unprocessed licorice root can raise blood pressure by prolonging the influence of fluid retaining hormones made by the adrenals.  This fraction of licorice root needs removal.  This process is known as deglycerrhization.  Enzymatic Therapy Co. makes an excellent product of this root in a powdered form” (Ferril, p. 213).

Day 45 – Good Day

Calm skin following yesterday’s Hydrocortisone usage, also really starting to feel like I’m making progress with being careful about my scratching.

After lunch in a moment of madness I ate FIVE OREOS, wow. On about the 3rd I stopped feeling guilty and thought “hey, this can be the test of my bloodsugar-eczema theory“. Anyway, didn’t scratch. Although, as with previous times when I’ve eaten biscuits, I did really really want to about 30mins afterwards. But managed to stay calm, control my thought processes and control my scratching. Excellent.

Went to a concert in the evening, the venue was dusty and I got a little restless and wanted to scratch, but avoided it there also.

To finish off, post-concert I had a pizza and…a BEER, shit! But, unlike on Day 43 I managed not to scratch. Really learning something here – when accepting that I am voluntarily exposing myself to triggers (in this case beer and pizza) it means I need to be even more on top of watching the moments I might start to scratch. One crucial point I want to scratch is when I change location. For example, sitting down in a restaurant, getting into a car, arriving home etc… I watched every one of these moments carefully and it worked 😉

Woke up during the night. Desperately thirsty, obviously, following beer and pizza. Controlled myself. Peace. No bottled water in the room. OK…control…peace. Maybe someone will have stayed up late and may have some water. No-one around. OK…peacefulness. Balance… In this scenario, it’s best to have a small glass of tap water from the room, even though I’ve been advised against this water. There we are, a sensible decision. No scratching. Done. I’ll rehydrate properly tomorrow morning.

Day 44 – Aftermath

Looking interestedly at my hands now, following last night‘s disastrous outburst of hand-scratching. There’s less redness than before, there are three holes that have now stopped weeping fluid (thank god) and I have little desire to scratch. Are they calming down as a result of today’s Hydrocortisone intervention and long afternoon nap? Or is the eczema in a falsely-induced coma, storing the cortisone in my body fat in order to react worse the next time I try to withdraw? I suspect some combination of the two, and continue to (on balance) be happy that I’ve only used my weakest steroid for well over a month now. Even if the cortisone is getting held by the skin and will, one day, have to be painfully washed out, I still think that it’s not a bad idea to use it to bridge the gap off steroids…

Ate pufuleti (a Romanian corn-based snack, very very light, but salty) instead of biscuits this eve. As described before I’m wondering about the connection between spikes in blood sugar. This theory would be backed up if I don’t scratch tonight…although…if I didn’t scratch tonight it would certainly be linked to me using the steroid ointment…ahhh so complicated.

Pufuleti aside, I ate healthily today. Was particulary pleased with my veg filled tuna-salad-plus-potatoes dinner, and the “apa minerala” (carbonated water) I had with squeezed lemon…pretending it was Prosecco…

Day 43 – Lemon Juice On Skin?

Couldn’t help being decadent and unhealthy last night. When in Rome… Well, when in Romania where the cost of living is so low…just felt I had to have a niiice bottle of Prosecco at dinner with my girlfriend. Then had a vodka martini chaser at a bar, chased by a Cape Code (smirnoff, cranberry juice, squeezed lime), chased by a cheeky beer to finish me off.

Well. I was incredibly zen yesterday evening and didn’t scratch right until the third bar where I had my last drink – the cheeky beer. Part of the problem with being drunk is that one forgets to *anticipate* eczema problems. Whenever I enter a new place, the first 5 mins is absolutely crucial – I think it’s that my stress goes up while I come to terms with a new environment, or something… Anyway, being drunk I forgot to be on high alert, and the scratching started. Quite bad scratching (I drew blood) on my lower back.

Arriving home (and still being drunk) I thought it would be a good idea to try out (again) applying squeezed lemon juice directly to my skin. Apart from being a natural antiseptic (and therefore a possible replacement for my Dermol 500 cream) there are a few bits and pieces online about lemon juice helping the healing process… Well, it’s a good thing I was drunk. As you’d expect, applying lemon juice to an open wound STINGS like hell. It’s like those movies where the hard nut gets shot in the arm and has to pour whisky (sorry, bourbon) over the wound to prevent infection. Blinding pain, but pain that does die down reasonably soon after. I think it wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t scratched so deeply…

Anyway – what were the results? I applied the lemon juice to my hands, my elbows, the back of one knee, and my lower back. All the above have woken up better than I’d expect, I think, BUT… during the night I really really seriously scratched my hands. Really really nasty stuff. I can’t explain this, at all. Why would the lemon juice irritate my hands so much but not any of the other (initially much worse) areas? The only thing I can think is that I didn’t clean the lemon juice off my hands properly, and that the other areas weren’t affected because I *did* manage to clean them properly. What a conundrum. Verdict’s out on lemon, for the moment, I think.

I am terrified about my eczema getting infected, as this can have really debilitating results – any bright ideas from the floor?

Day 42 – Current Theories

To balance the negativity from my Hack Rant two days ago, here are some more positive thoughts about what might be exacerbating, and helping, my eczema.

Topical Steroid Withdrawal – One bit of cynicism I’m really struggling to get rid of is about this idea of cortisone being stored in your skin somehow, that you have to go completely cold turkey in order to “detoxify” yourself, and that whilst this happens one’s eczema gets much worse. Oracle was completely convinced of this, but I’m not so sure. It just a) seems really convenient for the advocates of a solution to say it makes the problem worse before it makes it better, and b) is a bit scary – I don’t really fancy seeing my eczema plunge back to it’s previous depths before it recovers, frankly, and would rather temper the “comedown”.

However! Since I started using the shea butter my face has been generally brilliant, even as the rest of my body has passed through one disaster after another. And…get this: I have never really used steroids on my face, out of concern for thinning the skin. So this does seem to be fairly decent evidence in favour of the steroid extraction theory described above.

Stress – I’ve now measured 20 serious outbreaks of scratching since 3rd July, that’s just under one per day, and as described before I’ve been measuring my level of stress immediately before each outbreak. I have never recorded a scratching outbreak where I’ve measured my level of stress to be lower than 7 out of 10 beforehand, and the mean is 8.4 out of 10. I think this is a pretty impressive statistic. How to reduce stress whilst being self-employed, however, is another problem in itself. My seven day “stress detox” basically didn’t happen. I picked the wrong time for it, perhaps. I knew this seven day period was going to be heavily stressful before I started. More work to be done on the stress thing, for sure.

Blood Sugar (Sex Magick) – Since my trip to Romania started, it’s been almost impossible to control my diet. I haven’t been able to get hold of rye bread, or even wholemeal bread, so I’ve been eating lots of white bread, some cheese, and some cow’s yoghurt for the probiotics. I have managed to avoid caffeine, for the most part, and have avoided chocolate.

One thing I have had a few times is biscuits, and note that 100% of the times I’ve eaten biscuits I have had a serious scratch outbreak soon afterwards. This makes me wonder, again, if peaks in blood sugar are having an affect on my scratching.

Scratch locations – I’ve also been thinking about the different locations I scratch. I’m interested in the order of them (which ones I start with, and which ones the itch gets “chased” to), the severity of the scratching, and the speed with which they recover. So:

– the back of my neck is the worst, in that it’s frequently the first place to get “hit”, takes quite a while to recover, and is victim to serious scratching where I really dig the nails in 😦

– the base of my back doesn’t get hit very often, but when it does it is very severe and takes forever to recover

– the backs of my knees take a couple of days to recover, aren’t hit very often, but are hit quite severely

– my lower legs are very rarely scratched, and recover reasonably quickly unless they get infected, so they are a dangerous place

– my hands take a few days to recover, and are particularly prone to continued abuse even when they are already bad

– the backs of my elbows are an immensely pleasurable place to scratch, and take a long time to recover

– the insides of my elbows get red and inflamed, but the skin is rarely broken, which is interesting their recovery time isn’t too great though.

– my jaw is a favourite place to scratch first, but recovers very quickly and the skin rarely breaks

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Well, that’s all for now, folks. Oh yeah – after today I will have only used my hydrocortisone ointment 1% once in the last week. I will have had a 4-day run of not using any steroids, and could go for my record, which is 8 days.