Vitamin D Tablets - My skins best friend

It probably sounds funny that I live in Australia and need to take vitamin D tablets, but recovering from cortisone induced eczema has seen my shy away from the sun, rarely going out when it is bright and hot and never taking my shirt off to catch some rays.  As such, my vitamin D levels would be low I assumed, and after a few weeks of my skin playing up and being generally red and uncomfortable, I thought I would give them a go.

It's hard to know if it was cause and effect, or if my skin was just ready to improve, but since taking the vitamin D capsules my skin has been much smoother, whiter and much less itchy.  Of course I have nothing to compare this to, so I really don't know if it's fact or fiction, but reading through ITSAN, it seems vitamin D is a winner in the recovery process.

Sunlight is something that ITSAN regularly reports as a successful helper in the recovery process, so it makes sense that vitamin D in any form would be helpful.  Vitamin D helps the skin hold together with a whole realm of necessary functions.  Congruent with this, it's all about balance, and missing any key vitamin or mineral is going to slow down the healing process.

I'll keep you posted on my progress, but this is the best I have consistently looked and felt for some time.

The recovery of red skin continues - 9 months

It has been over 9 months of recovery now and day by day it's getting better.  Internally the body is healing and that extends to the external look and feel.  This video highlights the recovery to date from cortisone induced eczema. Cheers for reading, any questions just comment below.

Is diet causing my red skin flares?

I'm not sure why diet has crossed my mind recently, but I have been thinking about it for a while.  Others like Jake and Lib have gone on the gluten free, sugar free diet and seen great results, whilst there are other recoverers that have maintained a terrible diet.  For myself I've notices my skin colour and texture fluctuating regularly, and whilst I know this is common, I wonder if I can influence it via diet.

Quite red in the face and hands after 9 months of recovery from topical cortisone steroid addiction

To test this theory I'm going to be good for the next couple of week.  Lots of salad, chicken and fish, plain unprocessed foods, no alcohol and minimal sugar.  It will be interesting to see if there is a noticeable difference.  If there is, we can start to investigate if my body is sensitive to certain food types.

I know some people will question why I wouldn't have worked this out earlier, however remember that earlier I would have been constantly exposed to this body stress and hence my body was only showing small signs of flushing.  After coming off cortisone my diet has changed and it's possible that when my body gets a dose of something it's sensitive to, it's creating much more noticeable reactions.

The redness in my body has been mainly concentrated to my face, chest and hands and it's this localisation that also leads me to think that food may be playing a small role.  Of course let me stress that the cortisone recovery is the main problem, we know this, but is food playing some role and can I get a better quality of life if I monitor my food?

Time will tell, stay tuned in readers :)

Short term flare up - Cortisone induced red skin recovery

The recovery from cortisone induced eczema is a long and confusing road.  Your body improves and improves, then all of a sudden it goes bad, takes time to recovery and repeats the process.  Personally I don't let it bother me, I know it's a long term goal and any given day is nothing to measure success by, but it can be concerning to many (including my parents).

Over the weekend my body went from very good, quite white and just a light cover of dry skin, to terrible in the space of one night.  I didn't do anything different, I wasn't any more stressed, or eat anything different to normal, just overnight my skin decided it would get very thin and any scratching or movement would bring moisture to the skin surface.  When I say 'moisture', what I mean is that the skin is so thin that basically the top is being scratched off and the skin is oozing a slick moisture that never seems to stop.... it's pretty gross.

Me after 8 months of recovery, still quite pink in the face

I put a t-shirt over the top of the oozing and this stopped it across the day.  I also concentrated on not scratching at all and of course this helped a lot.  Over the next couple of days the top layer of my skin dried out completely, leaving the skin dry and cracked, but finally after 3 or 4 days, the dry skin peeled away and it's back to quite normal.  The colour is white with a pink tinge and whilst a little dry, it's all pretty good.

I don't really know why this cycle continues to occur, but I know that it's just a matter of time.  Every week is a little better, day by day, month by month I get closer to fully healed.  I am thankful to my amazing family, supportive friends and of course Katherine who bears it all with a smile.

Hope everyone else is doing well, feel free to shoot any questions through.

8 Month recovery update

Well 8 months in and it has been a series of ups and downs.  I had just recovered from a month worth of flare up on my chest when the occasion occurred that I had to take antibiotics, the first course I had taken in about a year.  This brought about an important discovery... I'm allergic to antibiotics.

The result of the allergy was three days of bright redness, swelling and itchiness.  The problem was that because I had to stop taking it, the staph infection that I had originally noticed was given time to spread to took over my entire face, neck and chest with a million pustules.  This rendered me basically bed bound for week, but finally it's starting to go away.

Interestingly the colour of my skin improved dramatically with the use of non-penicilin based antibiotics.  I would love to know the reason for this and will be keen to track the progress once I get off them and the staph has healed.

If you touch my skin at the moment you would notice it's still dry, but a top coat of moisture has started to form.  The key is not scratching, as once you take the top layer off, then layers and layers of dry skin are underneath, it's a matter of not scratching.

Healing continues well, but as always, we just have to wait it out, stay health and positive, always looking forward.

All the best to you all my friends.

Josh

Cortisone eczemas flare up update

Red Skin Flare Up - Month #7

It finally happened, my body finally had the flareup everyone else has talked about.  Jake & Lib from http://eczemahealing.blogspot.com.au had warned me that it would happen, and in Jakes case it was extremely severe and long lasting.  Myself however was much less severe only lasting about one week, but in doing so there were some very interesting body-wide affects.  So what happened?

Last week I noticed that my stomach was playing up, I felt a little ill when I ate, my tummy was having trouble digesting and I was burping and farting a lot more than normal.  These symptoms deteriorated further to the point where I was barely able to use the bathroom (producing very small stool), yet farting and burping non-stop, whilst my stomach was extremely loud as it tried to process the healthy food I was eating.  At this point I want to point out that I was eating very healthy, chewing my food a million times per mouthful and drinking lots of water, so it was certainly something else at play.

No so far I've only talked about my guts, but there was also a reemergence of the red, dry, raised skin on my chest and back.  It was almost an allergic reaction as this flare was only on these areas and was quite pronounced.  Katharine was not all that phased by it, but she did point out that it was quite angry and dry and I always take notice of other people's opinions to validate my own perceptions.

One week in and it has all gone away and back to normal.  I woke yesterday morning to see that it had mainly gone away, went straight to the bathroom and took a very large and solid crap (yeap, couldn't think of a nicer word to use here). The point is that the whole system was working together, it broken together and it healed together.

I've been trying to work out why this happens to everyone, I mean it doesn't make logical sense that all of a sudden the body would go back to being bad after being so close to perfect.  My theory, with absolutely zero credible evidence is that during the 'using cortisone period' the body is storing byproduct in the skin cells or guts or somewhere, and as the healing takes place this comes out and causes a reaction in the body.  I imagine in Jakes case it takes a very long time for this to work through, and in my case there is much less, so much shorter duration.   It's just a theory, anyone else got ideas?

Sorry I forgot to take pictures.