And by "it," I mean the explosion of my malar rash. When your face looks like this, you spend a lot of time thinking about it. I have carefully tracked my diet, sunlight exposure, fluorescent light exposure, sleep schedule, pet dander contact, laundry detergent usage, coffee intake, planetary rotation, and the migration of the arctic tern in the hopes of determining the cause of the worsening rash. I couldn't come up with anything. I do think that I was having a problem with the lights at my place of work, but my employer and a co-worker put UV filters over all of the fluoresces. It helped some, but not as much as I had hoped.
I've tried everything I could think of to heal it. Every prescription and homemade cream, lotion, ointment and unguent you can imagine: I've put it on my face. I've used ice packs when the pain and swelling were too intense. Sometimes it throbs. Sometimes it cracks and starts bleeding. Every where I go, people ask about it. Customers at work, people at Target, the woman at the drive-thru. It's not cool, people. It's just not cool.
Finally, after almost three months, I pleaded with my dermatologist for another biopsy of the rash. He relented. So, they took a quick punch biopsy and sent it off to the lab. The results took two long weeks to come back, and weren't what I was expecting at all. What you see in that picture up there is apparently a very rare reaction to severe immune suppression, specifically the immune system of the skin. I was boggled! I haven't been on prednisone for a couple of years, and none of my meds are immunosuppressants. So what on earth could have happened to my face?
And that's when it hit me... Remember back when I first posted that I was feeling better? And I said that one of the earliest signs of feeling better was that I had the energy to shower much more frequently than I had for years? Riiiiight. Well, though I had never given it much thought before, our skin has it's own little biome just like every other part of our body. My skin had totally adapted to very infrequent showers. When I started bathing every day (and sometimes twice a day just because it felt so good!), I must have really disturbed the balance on my face. So, it started acting up, sending me signs that I was doing the wrong thing. And what did I do? Start washing it more. And using more and more THINGS on it to heal it. When it wouldn't heal, I went back to the dermatologist to get a real answer. He didn't know, but thought it couldn't hurt to try treating me for an overpopulation of demodex (a mite that lives on all of our faces). So, twice a day I performed a rigorous exfoliation of the skin on my face and then applied straight up tea tree oil. WHICH PROBABLY KILLED ANY HEALTHY MICROBES I HAD LEFT!!
Ugh! What did I do? Each treatment I've tried has only made it worse, and now it's all pretty clear why. I can't believe I was so out of touch with this situation. It's like someone came along and switched off my intuition completely.
I've tried everything I could think of to heal it. Every prescription and homemade cream, lotion, ointment and unguent you can imagine: I've put it on my face. I've used ice packs when the pain and swelling were too intense. Sometimes it throbs. Sometimes it cracks and starts bleeding. Every where I go, people ask about it. Customers at work, people at Target, the woman at the drive-thru. It's not cool, people. It's just not cool.
Finally, after almost three months, I pleaded with my dermatologist for another biopsy of the rash. He relented. So, they took a quick punch biopsy and sent it off to the lab. The results took two long weeks to come back, and weren't what I was expecting at all. What you see in that picture up there is apparently a very rare reaction to severe immune suppression, specifically the immune system of the skin. I was boggled! I haven't been on prednisone for a couple of years, and none of my meds are immunosuppressants. So what on earth could have happened to my face?
And that's when it hit me... Remember back when I first posted that I was feeling better? And I said that one of the earliest signs of feeling better was that I had the energy to shower much more frequently than I had for years? Riiiiight. Well, though I had never given it much thought before, our skin has it's own little biome just like every other part of our body. My skin had totally adapted to very infrequent showers. When I started bathing every day (and sometimes twice a day just because it felt so good!), I must have really disturbed the balance on my face. So, it started acting up, sending me signs that I was doing the wrong thing. And what did I do? Start washing it more. And using more and more THINGS on it to heal it. When it wouldn't heal, I went back to the dermatologist to get a real answer. He didn't know, but thought it couldn't hurt to try treating me for an overpopulation of demodex (a mite that lives on all of our faces). So, twice a day I performed a rigorous exfoliation of the skin on my face and then applied straight up tea tree oil. WHICH PROBABLY KILLED ANY HEALTHY MICROBES I HAD LEFT!!
Ugh! What did I do? Each treatment I've tried has only made it worse, and now it's all pretty clear why. I can't believe I was so out of touch with this situation. It's like someone came along and switched off my intuition completely.
So, now I'm trying a regime of not washing my face at all, only showering twice a week again, applying oil to soothe all of the dryness and doing a few things to help repopulate the good flora that should be living on my face. I've been at it for a week now, and I'm finally starting to see some improvements. Here's a picture taken just this morning. I'm pleased with the difference so far.