Day 55 – Time

To relieve the sleep deprivation and mild hangover of yesterday’s disastrous video game marathon, I had a coffee this morning. This neatly takes me right back to Day 1 of my eczema diet, and in a way I’m ready to start again.

There are interesting time/convenience implications of using my various creams and oils. On the morning of Day 55 I found myself with 30mins to have a shower and apply whatever treatment I was going to before I had to teach. My skin was in a pretty disastrous state, and I religiously would apply *something* moisturising after a shower. Shea butter is the ticket, but it takes forever because of the consistency of it…so thick! Hydrocortisone was inevitably going to have to happen on Day 55, but I’ve been advised by a dermatologist not to apply it straight after a shower. Dermol cream is another option, but it doesn’t really give any lasting relief. (I don’t like Dermol anyway, I’m tending to use it just to prevent infection *right* after a scratch attack).

So the only thing left in my arsenal that I’m using at the moment is coconut oil. This is supposed to be nourishing for the skin, which is what it needed, but it doesn’t provide as much instant relief as shea butter. I’ve also noticed that coconut oil is much less useful at stopping scratching in the middle of an attack, which is interesting. Anyway, it works perfectly in this scenario – after a shower I find it is “drunk up” by the skin much more easily, and in this case I didn’t feel like scratching (even after an almost unprecedented amount of coffee – I had three…I didn’t tell the whole truth earlier).

The rest of the day was spent recovering. I applied hydrocortisone everywhere – but, as always, just the 1% stuff, the absolute lowest strength steroid they prescribe… At the moment, even with my complete failure to abide by the eczema diet of late, I’m still getting away with only using hydrocortisone once every 3 days or so – not too bad at all, I’m delighted I haven’t used anything stronger for almost 2 months now. Something is working. Now, just need to get back on track with that diet…

Day 53 – The Hangover

Epically hungover from Day 52, and with morale at a low with regards to my failure to adhere to my eczema diet on even the most basic level, it was a minor miracle today wasn’t worse.

Day 52’s G&Ts produced an unusal hangover that flicked between mild nausea, tiredness, and over-emotionalness. But I’ve always found there to be something reasonably cathartic about a hangover, and using that peacefulness I prevented scratch outbursts all day today. Of course this isn’t such great news, because a big part of me wants my eczema to just be caused by alcohol, so I can then control it very simply by resorting to abstinence when I want my skin to heal. I guess life’s just not like that!

Of course I’m sure there’s no link between the quinine in G&T and the hangover unusually being scratch-free. And I can’t imagine there’s a nutritionist in the world who’d see potential benefits for the skin of necking three double G&Ts and two beers.

Another couple of notes from Day 53. As part of a planned “day off” on Day 54 (details to follow) I had to lug an amount of heavy equipment including a monitor quite a way late in the evening on Day 53. Considering that I was expecting the post-alcohol scratching to kick in I was delighted with my scratch-free performance in the evening. After lugging the stuff around everywhere I did want to scratch on arrival – particularly my shoulders where my rucksack had been held – but I’m the master of this type of situation now. This type of desire to scratch (caused by mild friction plus mild physical exertion) is always temporary. The recipe is to stick it out, and then apply moisturiser as normal afterwards. This one was shea butter, and it worked! No scratching 😀

Finally – very recently I’ve (amongst other things) stopped avoiding nuts (my RAST/blood test showed I was producing some sort of immune response to them). My eczema has been bad, but then the stress levels and alcohol consumption have gone up recently so I still can’t really incriminate nuts based on actual evidence. I did enjoy my pasta pesto salad (containing cashew nuts) for lunch today though!

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.