The Burden of My Life. Eczema

Well hello there strangers! I will admit.....I am awful at blogging. I really am!
but here I am, writing again. I will also admit (lots of admitting going on here!) that I'm supposed to be revising right now for my two Uni exams. I'm going to write another post on this, so I shan't go off on a tangent now.

I've been meaning to write this post ever since I started this Blog way back last year but I've never really had the guts/time/inspiration to sit down and actually do it, but seen as I'm in top procrastination mode, I will do anything to not revise!

So I guess I should start at the beginning! (does everyone else sing the song when someone says that?!)

When I was born, I guess you could say I was completely fine. It was all lovely and great and Mama and Papa R and Brother L took me home and life was dandy. After a few weeks, six to be precise, I was diagnosed with Eczema. Now you guys reading this may think 'oh yeah! I've had eczema, here and there' well I had and still to this day have it everywhere. All over my body. YAY.

I suffer with severe Eczema, and let me tell you, its...to think of a better word....poopy.
Eczema runs in my family, with a few members of  Mama R's family suffering with it, so it was kind of inevitable that it would carry on making a very unwelcome appearance through generations. My brother also suffers with it so I didn't really have the best chance of avoiding it, as much as I would have liked to.

I spent my younger years being smothered and rubbed and bandaged and mittened and moisturised and bathed and scrubbed and soothed by my parents and have had countless different types of creams and ointments and tablets and whatnot. but now I've just turned 19 and yep. its still here. On one of my many regular hospital trips when i was younger (they've kind of just left me to deal with it now) I was told that 'eczema tends to disappear every 7 years'. So I anticipated my seventh birthday, filled with hope, with some idea that I was going to wake up and have normal skin. In hindsight of course now I realize that that is never going to happen, but as I approached my 14th birthday I couldn't help but hope slightly that it might just disappear overnight. I've now come to realise that nope, I'm pretty much stuck with 'funny' skin for the rest of my life! 

I guess you could say I'm used to having it, and the majority of the time it doesn't really bother me, simply because I don't know any different. I cant remember those 6 weeks I spent my life without eczema, so to me its the norm. But sometimes, as with any medical condition, it just gets me down. Having to constantly worry whether I've remembered to bring my cream with me everywhere I go and have to put it on in front of people (especially new people) I'm just not the greatest fan of having to do that. and then if I forget my cream I have to deal with having uncomfortable dry tight skin which ruins my outing anyway. It also makes me very self conscious  of course with people I know and are comfortable around its not an issue, but when it comes to new people I always feel like they are focusing on 'what's wrong with her skin' rather than me and my personality. I've encountered a fair few nasty people along the way who we'rent the most polite people but it seems as I get older and obviously people mature, its more a case of people wanting to know about it rather than laughing at it. which is a good thing.

Doctors always tell me that I will have 'triggers' things that send my skin crazy. and when I say crazy I mean CRAZY. when I get a flare up it feels like the hardest thing in the world is to not itch and scratch. which makes it worse, and I'm just stuck in this endless cycle of convincing myself it doesn't itch then itching over and over and over. But the thing is, up until now I really had no idea what my 'triggers' were. It just seemed to happen randomly if I got too hot or something. Now I'm starting to realize that stress plays a big role in my flare ups. I've had a difficult time lately (get your violins out!) which I wont go into detail about, but I've also realized my skin has been AWFUL, flaring up every other day. I wont lie, its made me feel disgusting and down and I haven't wanted to go out and enjoy life because I think people will be staring at my skin. don't get me wrong I know life could be a lot worse and I could have a much worse condition, but we all get absorbed into our own problems and sometimes don't appreciate how good we've really got it.

 but boy, is my skin a pain in the bottom!


on that note I think I better go and put some cream on ;) and start revising. oh the joys of examinations.
But if any of you reading this suffer with eczema.....I FEEL YA PAIN BRO.