About Me 005: Eczema
I made this rash from scratch!
1
In first grade, I noticed a small square of itchy redness on the inside of my left foot. There were little bumps amid the red patch. I imagined them as tiny volcanoes sprouting from the desert landscape of my skin. I scratched. In time, the rash grew bigger and showed up on my right foot, too.
2
At some point, my doctor prescribed a steroid cream (Hydrocortisone). At some point, I learned to call the rash “eczema.” At some point, I understood the rash to be part of me, as chronic, as an insoluble aspect of my identity. At some point, I began to equate the state of my rash with the state of my spiritual life.
3
I grew up in an evangelical church. I was taught about sin and forgiveness. I began to feel guilty for everything I did wrong. I even felt guilty for things I hadn’t done. If my rash got worse, I believed there was some unconfessed sin. If my rash got better, God was happy with me.
Every night, my parents prayed with my sister and me. I had a standard opener to all my prayers: “God I pray that we would get a good night’s sleep tonight and that you’d heal my eczema and DJ-Beth-Molly-and-Will’s asthma…” Every night I prayed for healing. The eczema never cleared.
4
There are multiple correct ways to say eczema. I first heard it as “ek-ZEE-ma.” Since I only heard the word spoken by my doctor and parents, I never knew otherwise. In high school, one of my friends said “EK-se-ma,” and I thought they were so wrong. They thought I was wrong. In college and beyond, everyone said, “EK-se-ma.” My new doctor, and later my allergist, said “EK-se-ma.” I looked it up, and apparently there are three correct ways to say it. The two above pronunciations are both acceptable, as is “EGG-ze-ma.”
When I first heard people calling it “EK-se-ma,” I was offended. “Ek-ZEE-ma” was part of my self-understanding, part of who I was, and if someone pronounced it differently, it was as if they had chosen not to recognize me. “Ek-ZEE-ma” sounds powerful to me. “EK-se-ma” sounds like it’s being coughed out. It may be silly to be offended by someone’s pronunciation of eczema. I’ve gotten over it. But at the time, it felt like something sacred about me was being warped, turned into something it was not.
5
The constant reminder from my parents (and sometimes from others): “Don’t scratch!” I learned to scratch my feet in secret.
“Don’t scratch” was probably the least helpful advice I could receive. When you have a casual itch, you scratch it. It goes away. When you have a mosquito bite, you scratch the itch, you’re satisfied. But then the itch returns. Imagine a mosquito bite that never stops itching. And it is the size of a dollar bill across the side and top of your foot. Your scratches are long, and feel good the entire length of your rash.
Sometimes I scratched until the little rashy volcanoes oozed a clear liquid, almost like sweat. Sometimes I scratched until I bled. At this point, the itchiness usually went away and the stinging pain arrived.
I experimented with different methods of scratching. My fingernails were most likely to break the skin. I rubbed the rash with my fingertips, but this was not nearly as satisfying. Scratching and rubbing through my socks was generally the least messy, but if I scratched for too long, I could still ooze or bleed with this method.
My feet were most itchy in the evenings. Sometimes they would itch in the middle of the day. If I scratched while I was, say, at school, and my feet started oozing, the liquid would become crusty and then the rest of the day I’d have crusty socks. In the evening, when I would remove those socks, they stuck to my skin.
Sometimes at night I would wake up scratching my feet. My sheets would have blood on them. During the day, I scratched my rash mindlessly. I wouldn’t even be aware I was doing it.
6
Solutions came from all directions. Winter was better for me because my feet didn’t get hot and sweaty. Summer was better for me because I walked around barefoot more often and my feet could breathe. My feet were too sweaty; they needed to dry out more. My feet were too dry; I needed to moisturize. My feet needed to air out. I couldn’t go barefoot outside—too many allergens.
I loved running around barefoot in the grass. Afterward, I would furiously scratch all night. Barefoot at the beach was okay. In fact, the sand seemed to make my skin better.
I was itchy after taking a hot shower, and sometimes had hives all over my torso. Soaking my feet in cold or lukewarm water was such a relief.
These were the years I had no answers, no questions, no attention for the patterns of my body. I had good days and bad days. I had itchy days and days without itch. I coped with eczema, but didn’t try to seek its cause or avoid allergens. I just lived my life and dealt with the consequences.
7
In high school, my parents took me to see a dermatologist. He did a skin patch test, and the only allergen I responded to was Cobalt-60, an isotope of cobalt present in rubber and elastic.
The dermatologist recommended I moisturize after showering. To this day, my shower routine includes putting lotion on before getting dressed. He prescribed a stronger cream for my eczema: Fluocinonide. Then Clobetasol.
8
In college, my rash continued. In 15 years, my feet had never been clear of eczema. After my junior year of college, I worked as a counselor at a summer camp for the second year in a row. (This is where I met Allison the previous summer!)
In early August, I noticed that I had a sharp pain underneath one of my toes. There was no rock or thorn. There was broken skin and a small growth like a blister. I thought little of it, except that it grew more painful as the week progressed. Then the lymph nodes in my neck and groin started to swell and ache.
By Friday, it was hard to walk. I went to an urgent care. They took a test and gave me the results: a staph infection. The open sores on my feet, because of my eczema, had left me vulnerable to this infection. In the car with Allison, I cried. It was the first time as an adult I had cried for myself. I felt vulnerable, fragile. Up to that point in my life, I had the privilege of taking my physical health for granted. This was the first time I recognized my mortality—how porous the body is to pain, disease, and complications.
9
In the spring of 2019, we went to Arizona to visit my parents, who had retired there. It was my first spring in Arizona, and my seasonal allergies were at their worst. In addition to sneezing and itchy eyes, I started getting eczema on my forearms. This was a new rash location for me. When we returned to Washington, the rash went away.
But then we did some gardening. After dumping out bag after bag of mulch, my forearms were red and bumpy. After mowing the lawn, my ankles and wrists were rashy, and I was big-sneezing every minute or so. (To be fair, all my sneezes are big sneezes.)
The rashes disappeared in time, but we learned that I either need to wear a lot of skin protection or refrain from certain kinds of yardwork.
10
I went to my first allergist appointment later that summer. I learned many things. After a skin test, I learned I am allergic to pollen from every deciduous tree in the Pacific Northwest, plus ragweed and dust mites.
My seasonal allergies only started as an adult. But my eczema, said the allergist, was related. Pollen was an irritant for my skin as well as my nose. (Turns out many of my food allergies are also related to tree pollen via Oral Allergy Syndrome, but that’s for another post.)
I got more information about how to protect my skin, how to treat my skin, when to moisturize (or not) my skin. I’ve gone to my allergist every year since, and each time, I have new questions, new revelations, new allergy manifestations to discuss.
11
Scratching feels good when you have a rash—at least, for a while. It doesn’t always remove the itch. In fact, scratching can make the region itchier. And in the course of an itch session, the scratching can become more desperate.
One evening, as an adult, I was rubbing my feet through my socks. The more I tried to satisfy the itch, the more it demanded. I rubbed more vigorously until suddenly, I felt a chemical release down my spine (maybe dopamine?). It felt good, almost like an orgasm. Unfortunately, the after-effect was immediate stinging pain in my feet. The chemical rush coincided with breaking the skin. The little bumps oozed their usual clear liquid, and a couple spots were bloody.
In the future, when my evening feet were particularly itchy, my body remembered that if I scratched hard enough and long enough, I could experience that chemical high. Scritch scritch scratch. As I worked, the itch would seem more desperately distant. It felt like my bones were itchy, and the only way to find satisfaction was to scratch all the way through my skin and muscle. But then, at a certain point, I’d have that scratching climax. “Don’t itch,” my foot!
12
In 2020, as the Covid-19 protocols were being enacted, I, along with everyone else, was slathering hand sanitizer all over my hands multiple times per day. In April, I started getting itchy rash spots on my fingers and palms.
Turns out that hand sanitizer is great at thinning the skin barrier. The shield against the spread of germs and Covid-19 was, for me, also a sword piercing my skin and leaving it vulnerable to allergens. Once I learned this, I started washing my hands in the sink instead of applying hand sanitizer. But in some venues, I couldn’t avoid the demand to sanitize. I sacrificed my skin for the anti-Covid cause. The sanitizer stung my hands every time I applied, leaving them feeling dried out and raw for up to an hour afterward.
Interestingly enough, during this time the eczema on my feet disappeared. I’m not sure what changed, but maybe my body could only maintain an outbreak in “one” location at a time. It had moved from my feet to my hands.
13
I’ve learned to separate the state of my eczema from the state of my spiritual life. Pain is not a punishment for sin. Good skin doesn’t mean God is somehow more pleased with me. However, I’ve never given up trying to analyze my life through a spiritual lens.
I ran cross country and track in middle school and high school, and running became a core part of my self-understanding. I was a runner, and running became the barometer for my spiritual state. A good or bad race reflected whether I was on good or bad terms with God. When I thought about career or homework or love or chores, I thought about things in terms of running. If I was a faster runner, I would “win the love of the girl and the respect of her father.” If I was a faster runner, it meant I would be a better journalist or rock star. Mowing the lawn was like running the laps of a race. Well into my twenties, I prided myself that while out for a “leisurely” run, I’d never been passed by another runner. Running was a core part of my identity.
Then I arrived at my thirties, had kids, worked year-round, ate too much food over too many years that didn’t quite get gobbled up by my metabolism anymore, and running began to play a smaller role in my life. By 2020, I had transitioned to daily walks. And in 2020, the eczema left my feet.
In 2020, I was also finishing up my MFA in creative writing. Even by the end of that program, I was having trouble calling myself a writer.
In my mind, people who called themselves “writers” were self-absorbed wannabes. “Writer” was a title you had to earn, not self-proclaim. This was my way of protecting myself if I failed at being a writer.
But I had been a writer my whole life. Since middle school, I had been writing songs and poems and stories and diatribes in my spare time. It was only now, at the end of my second creative writing degree, that I began to consider calling myself a “writer.”
This self-acknowledgement came at the same time the eczema moved from my feet to my hands. Could it be that the eczema moved to the site of my “core self-understanding”? I was no longer a runner (feet) but now had re-oriented myself as a writer (hands).
This may be a spiritualizing conjecture, but it has yielded insight nonetheless. Having eczema on my hands is almost like a vocational affirmation. Just because I am stepping into my calling doesn’t mean it will be easy. My own body may be an obstacle. It’s as if God is saying, “Are you willing to commit to the challenge? Will you keep writing even if it is painful, even if it stings?” My answer was and is yes, but I must re-commit every time I sit down to write. It’s easy to distract myself, to scratch other itches instead of writing. But I’ve found that the more I write, the more committed I am.
14
Flare-ups happen no matter how I treat my skin. Sometimes an allergen in the air or on a substance I’m working with will cause my skin to be itchy. Too much playing outside in the grass, for example, even if I’m wearing shoes, can irritate my skin. Then there’s dust mites which can be in my clothes or in the bedsheets. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my hands are inflamed—those are bad days and can make me as irritable as my skin. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to find that I’ve been scratching in my sleep. Some days are worse than others. I can’t always trace the cause; I simply have to cope with the current state of my skin.
Hot water can aggravate my skin, so showers and dishwashing can be a challenge. Scents and dyes added to soaps and detergents are problematic. Anti-bacterial soap is bad for my skin as well. After using it, my hands feel raw and overly dry.
I’ve switched to dye-free, scent-free laundry detergent, body wash, and handsoap. We only use wool balls to soften clothes in the dryer. We try to change our sheets every week to avoid dust mite build-up. I use cold water, pat dry, moisturize, air dry, apply ointment, avoid allergens, wear gloves, pop various allergy pills: Loratadine, Cetirizine, Fexofenadine. Flare-ups happen anyway. Flare-ups are normal, common, annoying, but not surprising.
I’ve noticed that typing on a laptop or holding a phone for prolonged periods irritates my hands. Perhaps it’s the heat from the device drying out the skin. My imagined question from God returns: “Are you willing to keep writing even if it hurts?”
I’ve read that there is another, more subtle, less tangible cause of eczema flare-ups: stress. It’s not that stress is an allergen. Higher levels of stress can lead to more inflammation in the body, and for those with eczema, it can cause more rash outbreaks. Could the shift in my eczema location—from feet to hands—be related to the stress I feel about becoming a writer?
15
In 2022, Allison, Finley, and I were living in hotels because of a house flood. As you might imagine, this was a very stressful time. On top of the instability, we were sick a lot.
I noticed that whenever I got a cold, my lips would feel strange. They weren’t chapped. Chapped lips, in my imagination, were like dry square panels along my lips. This new sensation was like tiny dots of irritation all along the outside edge of my lips. And chapstick made things sting more. After trying a few different brands of chapstick, I switched to Vaseline. Finally, relief.
Every time I got sick (once a month in 2022), my lips flared up in this new way. They were itchy sometimes, too, and I wondered if this was a new form of eczema appearing on my body. What’s causing the itch in this location? This is one of the problems of eczema: there are many conjectures, occasional certainties, but never any absolute rules.
Perhaps it is stress related to another vocational path I began in 2022: teaching (i.e., public speaking every day). My lips began their new rash at the same time I first inquired about teaching a writing class.
While this hypothesis is interesting, it is likely not accurate, or at least not the whole picture. Someday I may figure it out, but for now I cope as best I can.
16
Eczema is part of me, and always will be. It is a chronic condition. I no longer view it as a sickness to be healed or as a gauge for my spiritual life. Eczema is a companion, usually uncomfortable, but also insightful. It reminds me to take care of my body, my skin. It helps me to pause and consider my stress levels. And it spurs me to think about how it relates to my life and writing.
Thanks for reading. I encourage you to reflect on some aspect of your physical or mental health. What has been your history with this aspect? How do you relate to it? What might it reveal to you about yourself?
As a parent of a kid with eczema, allergies, OAS, all the things, I enjoyed this a lot. I like how you did a numbered list and all the ways you connected your ekZEEma to your spirituality and other parts of your inner life. Makes me want to chat with my son to see how he's processing it!