The Skin I Live In

One year and seven months ago I moved to Manchester for a job starting out in the TV industry. This was a brand new start for me and I was buzzing about finally being able to put my degree to good use! I found a great house to live in with a small community of friends and I was excited to start this new chapter of my life.

Before I moved to Manchester I had started getting red patches (almost like a rash) under my eyes and on my lids, and also around my lips. I was so confused and curious as to what could be causing this so I went to my mum for advice. The Queen of allergies and all things related (runs in the family along with eczema, asthma and hay fever), and of course she had a few ideas as to what it could be. She suggested I might be allergic to tomatoes, and maybe peppers, as they are both nightshade foods, which many people are known to have an allergy/intolerance to. So, naturally I cut out tomatoes from my diet – I did eat them pretty much every day whether it was fresh, or as a sauce - and waited to see what happened.

It was around this time I moved to Manchester, and it became in increasingly more difficult to cut out this food; the Saturday night pizzas, the lasagna dish I loved to make, the curry nights out! It’s not until you try and cut something out that you realize that it’s in EVERYTHING! I slipped off the bandwagon a few times, but the rashes and red patches were so hit and miss, I wasn’t quite sure what I was actually allergic too. The fact that I’ve always had eczema didn’t help clarify anything either. I was told stress can aggravate eczema, and yeah, it’s true. I knew that before all this started happening, since exam time where I would scratch my arms until I bled. The point was, my skin had never been in this condition before and it was actually really confusing.

It wasn’t until a couple of months down the line after moving to Manchester that I had the first, really visible reaction. I was at work running on a shoot, and gradually throughout the day my face started to become red and patchy in places, and it felt horrible. I avoided tomatoes at lunch and I didn’t even have the dominos pizza that was being passed around in the evening! It got to the point where I just wanted to go home and hide under my duvet until my face was back to normal. 

I booked an appointment at the doctors and enquired about the ‘elimination diet’ that someone had recently told me about. I had done some of my own research and knew that it was basically a diet of pork and berries! When I finally got an appointment with a dietician, she had no idea what I was there for, due to the lack of detail in my notes from my doctor. As the appointment went on, we both realized that she probably couldn’t really help me (dieticians focus on intolerance to food and IBS), but I was so adamant I had an allergy to tomatoes, that I was desperate to try the ‘elimination diet’. All in all I think I kept it up for about a three days, but I was still having reactions to something else in my life.

So, back to the doctors I go. It took ages to get an appointment with a food allergist – during which time I looked like a red-eyed panda most days, and my skin would itch like crazy so I was constantly covered in eczema pretty much all over my body. I began to think it was alcohol – particularly white wine, as whenever I would drink, in the next 12-24 hours that’s when my skin would react.

When I finally saw the food allergist in July 2012, the unfortunate thing was my skin was perfectly clear! (I was taking steroids for Bell’s Palsy which had suddenly happened a few days before my appointment). So the annoying thing was, the doctor couldn’t see what I normally looked like when I had a reaction! Luckily I had taken photos of when I was at my worst for this exact reason and I suppose that was better than nothing. During my appointment the doctor asked what I thought I was allergic to, and how long after eating those things did I have a reaction. My reactions came on roughly 12-24 hours after I thought I had eaten something I shouldn’t have. When I said this, she told me that food reactions are up to 2 hours after eating the food. Regardless of this, they took blood samples to test for tomatoes. The test came back negative of course and I felt like I had hit another brick wall.

When I received the results from the food allergist, she had referred me to the dermatologist. The next available appointment was a few months away and I was reaching the end of my patience, I felt like I was constantly reacting to anything and everything. During the week I would avoid wearing makeup so my skin could recover, as I would always seem to have reactions on a weekend. I hated my face, especially when I would walk into an office full of gorgeous girls with clear, non patchy skin! I think it was around this time that I started looking into Chinese herbal medicine as another option. Every time I passed a Chinese clinic I would see the signs that said ‘Treatment for Eczema’ and wondered how much it might be able to help me. I decided to book an appointment at a small independent clinic in the center of Manchester – ‘Dr & Herbs’ felt just a little bit too mainstream – and after a half hour consultation I walked away with a concoction of dried herbs, a couple of small pots of cream and a shower gel. Oh, and £75 lighter. But you should have seen how many different herbs they measured out into the container; it must have been about 20 different brown powders. Regardless of my lack of knowledge of Chinese medicine, I walked away from that clinic with positive, high hopes and feeling like I’d taken control of my own situation. To be fair, at this point I hated the NHS and would have tried anything for pretty much any amount of money I could afford. And I mean anything.

Have you ever tried Chinese herbal tea/medication? Any one reading this and considering going for it, let me just tell you a few things…

A.     It’s expensive. It was costing me £35 a week just for the tea alone.

B.     It tastes like an ashtray. My particular concoction was a mixture between ashtray, Bovril and dirt. Needless to say it was a struggle to keep down.

C.     You have no idea what’s in it. (I’ll get back to this in a minute)

I started drinking the herbs on the Saturday night and less than a week later the skin on my face was practically clear. I was literally over the moon that I had found something that actually worked!! I continued using the herbs for the following few weeks, however I was becoming conscious of the amount of money I was spending, racking up a bill of £140 a month. When my appointment with the Dermatologist finally came around I had to explain the whole past year all over again, I had told this story too many times for my liking! In the week leading up to this appointment I had been running out of the tea, and I started taking tablets they had given me to see me over until my next appointment. My skin had started going back to its old red and patchy ways, but I was almost glad. I wanted more than just an expensive miracle cure. I wanted a reason, an explanation; I wanted a little bit of science behind my condition. I explained to the Dermatologist I had started using Chinese herbal tea, which had really worked for my face. I was kind of expecting to hear what he told me, as I’d already done some research on Chinese herbal medicine, and various websites told me that some of these medicines contained steroids. The doctor wasn’t sure if my Chinese medicine in particular had steroids in it, however due to the fact that it cleared my skin within 5 days, it’s pretty safe to say it probably did.

It was a bit ironic that I had tried to avoid using steroid creams, when the tea I was drinking could have contained them. The doctor gave me a cream called Protopic to use on both my face and body when I had flare ups and also to keep it under control. I left the hospital feeling back at square one again. It had taken over a year to get to this point of seeing the correct specialist, and I was sent away with a prescription for a lousy tube of cream. I was however booked into the Contact Dermatitis clinic for patch testing in January 2013 so had something else to look forward to for an answer.

Over Christmas my skin worsened and I had a couple of bad reactions of really puffy, red swollen eyes and lips, and patches of itchy skin all over my body. Because my skin had been so clear during the time I was on the Chinese herbal tea, for it to go back to the way it used to be was really depressing. It was in the first week of January I had a bad reaction to something. I went to the walk-in clinic and the nurse (didn’t even get to see a doctor!) gave me a couple of prescriptions for the creams that I had ran out of, but didn’t give me any steroids, she just told me to take antihistamines. Stood in the pharmacy area of Boots *other chemists are available* waiting for my prescriptions, I just felt like the whole shop was staring at me. I avoided eye contact with everyone, even the staff who served me. I know it’s a bit pathetic, no one would ever had said anything, it’s just the fact that I was sick to death of the reactions, and not knowing when one would happen next, or how bad it would be.

A few weeks later I found myself at the hospital in the Contact Dermatitis Investigation Unit, on a Monday morning, carrying a bag full of all the products I use, from my shampoo and hair spray, through to my hand wash and makeup. In my initial assessment in the previous week my doctor (who was so lovely by the way) had explained what they would be testing for and how the next week of tests would pan out. So basically I was patched up with small amounts of chemicals and products I might come into contact with in every day life, as well as my own cosmetics and products. In total they were testing for 140 different ingredients/products, and 14 patches were placed on my back, upper arms and stomach. I wasn’t allowed to get them wet at all, I wasn’t allowed to shower or bathe, and I had to be careful not to let them fall off. They first day they were on was a bit weird, they felt really tight and slightly itchy. The second day the same but even more uncomfortable. By the end of the week I was ready to rip the patches off my skin and stay in the shower all day.  (I know what you’re thinking but I had a shower from the waist down every day that week.)

On the Friday morning they took the patches off and examined the effects on my skin. Straight away the (lovely) doctor could see I had a huge reaction to Ammonium Persulfate. Hair Bleach. Incase you don’t know me, I have been blonde since around the age of 18. I also found out I am allergic to Phthalic Anhydride, Adipic Acid and Neopentyl Glycol….  A.K.A Nail varnish. These chemicals are in most new nail varnishes and help strengthen the varnish. I am also allergic to Perfume, and anything that contains perfume. There are a few different chemicals of perfume that you could be allergic too, and the one that I react to is called (Alpha ) Hexyl Cinnamal Dehyde. Most of the time it’s written as Hexyl-Cinnamal, Perfume, Fragrance or Parfum on the ingredients list of products. There were two chemicals that were inconclusive due to the fact my skin had a patch of eczema near it, so I am due to be re-tested for these next week. One of them is Lanolin, which is derived from Sheep wool, and the other is Toluene 2.5 Diamine, which is a type of hair dye.

I felt such a sense of relief as I walked out of the hospital, I felt like a new woman, and I couldn’t wait to get rid of all the products I couldn’t use anymore. It was so bizarre thinking about all the times I thought I was allergic to alcohol, when really it was all the makeup and hairspray I was using for the night out that was making my skin go crazy!! How many people had I actually told I was allergic to tomatoes!? I didn’t care any more, I was just so happy to have found an answer after a year and a half of mystery.

If you’ve just read this and are having similar reactions, please make sure you keep going back to your doctor until you get the treatment you need. If you have a hospital appointment a few months down the line, keep calling to see if they have any cancellations so you can get seen sooner. The NHS need their ass kicking to be honest.

Hols x