Usually I like to write blog posts that are useful/helpful and contain lots of tips for others on their wellness journey. However, with everything going on with my skin right now, this is not something I can really focus on. So instead, I’m choosing to write personally about what I’m going through. It helps me process things better and is my therapeutic outlet that at the same time lets others into my world. I believe stories hold a lot of power. So at least for the time being, my blog posts are going to be more story-like, chronicling my healing journey, my challenges, everything I’m going through and the work I’m doing to rise above. I hope this can give help and hope to others who are greatly suffering too.
Picking up from where I last wrote, things were steadily improving with my hands. I even got to take a small overnight trip with my boyfriend in August, the first outing I’ve felt well enough to take all summer! We traveled to the Connecticut countryside and stayed overnight on a horse farm, went berry picking, hiking, and ate at an amazing vegan restaurant called G-Zen (which just so happens to be rated as one of the top 20 vegan restaurants in the country!!) I was shocked to discover this gem tucked away in a small CT town, just a couple hours from where I live. Why didn’t I ever know about this before?! I seriously love travel and exploring, you always discover something new.
Anyway this vegan restaurant was so out-of-this-world incredible that my boyfriend and I ordered appetizers, mains, dessert, then a second main entree EACH to go! Yep we are gluttons when we go out but it’s ok because we rarely ever do this. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve eaten out at a restaurant this whole year. This one was such a treat.
Some of the things we ordered…
This was a really great weekend outside in nature.
Unfortunately the trip stirred up some aggravation in my hands. I can tell that my body is in a very reactive, fragile state because just taking that short weekend trip set me back in bed for several days afterwards. My body is still so tired from months without much sleep that it doesn’t take a whole lot to wear me out.
The second mistake I made after the trip was allowing myself to scratch my hands. They were looking much less inflamed than before, the open wounds had finally all healed and my hands were beginning to look normal again. And so, when the urge to itch came up, I thought it would be ok to indulge a little. NO NO NO! The thing with eczema is, the itching is so unbearable! It takes over your body and mind and requires every ounce of your willpower to fight it and not give in. And you must keep this willpower up ALL DAY and ALL NIGHT. It’s exhausting. You just want some relief and it feels SO GOOD to scratch where it itches.
Doing so was a BIG mistake.
It didn’t take long before I had scratched my skin open in several places. Tiny hairline cuts split open on my knuckles and fingers that stung horribly and the eczema started weeping which meant the beginning of an infection. The days and weeks that followed were some of the worst for me as my finger joints and knuckles crusted over completely from patches of scratched open skin and cuts. They burned, itched, and stung relentlessly. The worst part was that some cuts had formed in the folds of my fingers right where the joints bend. I could not get these hairline cuts to heal whatsoever because every little movement of my fingers would be enough to break open the wounds. Shaking my hands in the air to try to relieve itching became even harder because this very movement that brought a small measure of relief to my hands was also now actively splitting open cuts. I was in total agony.
It got to the point where I had to stop using my right hand completely for a few weeks because it was in such terrible shape. For two weeks I slowly and awkwardly typed with one finger, made food, picked things up, did everything with just one hand. The muscles in my right hand started atrophying and would occasionally go numb from lack of use.
Just as the cuts had finally healed on my hands after about 2 painful and miserable weeks, I scratched them just a tiny bit and unfortunately started a whole new eczema infection again! UGH!! Two horrendous weeks to heal my skin and just a second to ruin it again. I was SO upset at myself.
The last month for me has been the HARDEST as I experienced the worst eczema flare up to date (which I am still in btw). I should have considered myself lucky when I just had plain eczema and not infected eczema, because infected eczema is about a million times worse. This second time was particularly bad probably because my skin had had it at this point. I did not know how to treat the infection at all. Normally for a little cut I’d just wash it and put a band aid over it with some Sovereign Silver ointment to prevent infection. But now I had huge areas of my hands completely skinned raw and burning and of course I still had eczema on top of that. I had to be very careful with what I put on the rash that wouldn’t dry out my skin, irritate it or make it itchier. Peroxide and the like was out of the question. What I needed was something completely natural, chemical-free, gentle, soothing and of course anti-bacterial. And I needed it fast.
Immediately I thought of raw honey. I have used raw honey in the past to heal small cuts and loved how quickly it sped up healing. Did you know raw honey is naturally anti-bacterial and incredibly medicinal? The key is, it needs to be raw in order for us to receive the many healing benefits. It may seem weird to put honey on a wound but that’s only because we as a society aren’t used to using food as medicine. Honey is also a humectant which I knew would make it PERFECT for retaining moisture in my hands.
I didn’t think honey would be able to help with the itching though so I decided to add aloe to the mix (another natural anti-bacterial that’s GREAT at reducing eczema itching but extremely drying soon afterwards on its own). Yep, I made my own anti-bacterial eczema concoction. I got a tip from someone online to add turmeric as well, as they said it would be good for reducing itching and inflammation. I wasn’t so sure about the reducing itching part but I thought, “Sure, why not try it.” As a final insurance against infection, I decided to add a little bit of Sovereign Silver so I would have 3 different anti-bacterials working for me!
Here is the recipe I came up with to heal infected eczema:
1 part fresh aloe
2 parts raw honey
1 small spoonful turmeric powder
Half a dropperful of Sovereign Silver
Mash the aloe up with a fork and stir all other ingredients in. Cover and refrigerate the excess amount.
I applied the mixture all over my hands. It was immediately soothing but I’m not going to lie, a few parts of my hands were so open and inflamed that putting anything on them was going to burn and sting a lot. I gritted my teeth and tried my best to breathe through it even though the whole time there was a huge knot in my throat and I was wincing in searing pain. The next week was so hard as my raw, cut open skin was stinging so much and my body was in constant fight or flight mode.
Having honey and turmeric-covered hands means you cannot touch anything; or rather, anything you touch sticks to you or becomes very sticky. It also means that anything you accidentally bump or brush with your hands (your face, your clothes, your bedding, your phone case) gets stained bright orange from turmeric. After the first week I decided to cut the turmeric out of the recipe because it was too hard to keep little orange stains from happening everywhere. The honey/aloe/silver mixture works fine.
Because of my very raw and honey-covered hands, I had to stop using my hands almost completely and had no choice but to now rely on my boyfriend to make ALL my meals for me. This has not been easy on him while working a full time and demanding job. He is now waking up 3 hours before he has to leave for work and spending that entire time preparing and making food for me and for Meadow. When he gets home from work, he has a bunch of dishes to wash and more food to prep for that night and the next day, plus Meadow’s dinner to make (we choose not to feed Meadow pet food and instead give her homemade meals with fresh ingredients). It is a LOT for him to juggle and I know he is stressed and exhausted from the excess workload.
He constantly tells me not to worry though, to just focus on getting better, that he has my back and will help me in any way he can for as long as it takes. This guy. I credit this man for keeping me alive. He is a savior, my hero, and I am constantly in awe of the depths he will go to care for me and support me through this rock bottom hell. I am humbled by and in awe of his love for me which is a kind of love I have never experienced before by anyone else I’ve dated. It’s easy to be with someone through the good times. It’s a piece of cake. But it takes a powerful amount of love and compassion to stand by someone’s side through weeks, months, even years of pain and suffering. This entire experience has opened my eyes to the depth of what it means to truly love someone. I feel so grateful to have his love and care, without which I don’t even know if I’d be here right now writing you these words.
My hands are very slightly better. They’re no longer infected at least which is great; however, they are still so RAW. Because of all the inflammation and irritation that comes with eczema, its been impossible for new skin to form and heal on my hands this time around. The top layer of skin starts developing and then peels off before its had a chance to cover my raw skin. This has been going on for weeks and it’s incredibly disheartening, not to mention painful because raw skin stings and burns!
In order to prevent bacteria and infection from setting in, I have to keep the honey mixture permanently on my hands. It’s not terrible, it’s actually the one thing that’s given me the greatest relief against itching so far. But this means my hands are constantly sticky. I cannot cover them with anything – the smallest little touch on my hands at times can send me into a fit of violent itching – so honey is getting everywhere. At night I sleep with a large towel spread over my pillow and some paper towels for my hands to rest on and catch the honey mess. In the morning I wake up with honey and peeled skin smeared all over the paper towels. Gross, I know. But this is my reality.
For the past month my hands have been caught in this cycle of not being able to form new skin. What else can I do?? I feel like I’ve been doing so much already and nothing seems to help.
The answer, as it turns out, is to do much less.
Recently I had an appointment with a medical intuitive about my eczema. I love medical intuitives because I feel they can tune in and discover what’s really going on in a way that surpasses all the stuff doctors are taught in med school. This is just my personal opinion, I realise most people wouldn’t agree and would consider someone like a medical intuitive to be little more than a quack. You have to understand though, I’ve been down the standard medical route before quite a bit. When I was first diagnosed with severe psoriasis in college, I fully put my care in the hands of conventional doctors and dermatologists. I was told by them that there was no cure, that my body was attacking itself, that I would have to be on high-level steriods for the rest of my life and even then, the best that could do was try to manage my symptoms. I refused to accept that as the answer and my quest to overcome psoriasis was what really kicked off my foray into the natural healing world.
The body does NOT attack itself – it never attacks itself. Toxins and pathogens and viruses attack the body – yet the blame does not get placed on them but on us instead. There is SO much we don’t yet know. There is SO much doctors don’t yet know. In my lifelong struggle with various chronic health conditions and symptoms, I have learned through trial and error that diet and mindset are the two things that have the biggest impact on changing around our health. When someone tells me to just go on a pharmaceutical drug (which has a ton of side effects and risks associated with being on it), that just doesn’t sit well with me.
I have played the steroids game before in the past for psoriasis. While they can offer some initial relief, it’s never a solution; more a temporary suppression. Eventually as the dose you’re on stops working, you’re forced to increase to a stronger steroid, and when you do finally go off them, your skin EXPLODES worse than ever before. This is a territory I want to stay out of altogether.
So back to the medical intuitive. My session with her was short but she picked up on a lot which was surprising. From the start, I have suspected that my eczema was triggered by the trauma of my dad’s cancer last year and me sensing that he would soon die. I didn’t tell the medical intuitive anything about this, yet right away she picked up on a great deal of trauma and stress in my body from last year. She says this is what initially triggered the eczema and then my upping the dosages of all the supplements I had been taking at the same time put my body under even more stress. “You’re so sensitive,” she told me. “And your body cannot handle any of this.”
Based on the fact that there’s so much swelling in my hands, this shows that my liver and lymphatic system are extremely overburdened. There’s too much detox going on and my body is overwhelmed with major STRESS – this is why the eczema has gotten so out of control. My liver is overburdened from 1) too much die-off happening from the supplements; 2) massively increased viral attacks from the Epstein-Barr virus feeding off stress hormones in my body; and 3) the fear and panic created over not knowing what to do. It was fascinating to hear all of this and at the same time, I felt so bad for my poor body which is struggling to process everything its been hit with.
The medical intuitive’s recommendation for me was to stop taking nearly ALL my supplements, incorporate a few calming and cleansing teas into my day, and to just take things very very slow with lots of rest. Less is more in my case.
I also really have to get my stress levels under control which is vital to calming the eczema flares down. It’s so hard when you have severe eczema because every moment of every day is so stressful, just fighting through the intense itching and pain, not being able to sleep much or get a moment’s peace, spending every day in survival mode just trying to stay alive. Yet I know this is my work. The hardest work I’ve ever done. I have the physical part down but the mental/emotional part…. that’s the tricky one.
My options are to either develop the inner strength to mentally work through this and rise above or slowly but surely let this condition destroy me.
The thing is, I know exactly what I have to do. It’s the same thing I did six years ago when I couldn’t walk, when I finally decided to take my healing into my own hands and do the inner work that was needed to get better. I’ve been resisting doing this again because to tell you the truth, it’s far from easy. I would call the inner work I did back then on myself to be IMMERSIVE, DEDICATED, and DEEP. It wasn’t just a 1-hour healing session that I did on myself before moving onto the rest of my day. I lived and breathed the work. I literally transformed myself inside out. It was beyond rewarding, probably the greatest experience of my life, and I learned so much but… it was such hard work and DISCIPLINE to keep up with. Why do we not do the things we know we need to do? Why do we so often resist what we most need? I have lost my way but slowly, I return to the world in which I need and want to be…
Read part 4 of my eczema healing journey here
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