Rash

19

Toward the last half of fourth grade, my elbows and underside of my forearms started to itch. I did what came naturally and scratched but that seemed to only make it worse. After about a week of this, these areas were now scratched raw and the teacher took notice of this and sent me to the nurse's office. The nurse didn't know what to make of it and called in my mother to have me taken to the doctor.

He concluded that the rash was directly from my scratching and for my original itching, perhaps my skin had been touching something I was sensitive to. He ordered a steroidal cream to heal the rash and had mom schedule a follow-up. Picking up the cream at the pharmacy, I was to apply it twice a day to the affected areas and would soon see an improvement...

At the follow-up appointment there was no improvement and the doctor asked why I hadn't been using the cream. I told him I had been and he pointed out that he knew it wasn't true because if I had used the cream, the rash would be gone by now. The problem is I had used the cream and it hadn't helped, but what do you say when the doctor implies you're lying?

Mother's solution for the problem was to dress me in long sleeved sweat shirts. These hid the raw rash areas from the teacher and thus the problem was resolved in her eyes. And oddly, too, the rash itself improved over time with the long sleeves on. Was that because I could no longer easily scratch it? As I don't remember it itching once the long sleeves were on, I now wonder if the teacher had coated the top of the desk with something that I was having a reaction to when I rested my arms on the desk. From time to time she would rearrange the desks and we would come in and see that they also looked shiny and new. Was she coating them with something?

About this time I was also having problems at the dentists' office where they would clean my teeth and then my gums would swell up. The first time this happened, the dental assistant got nervous and called the dentist in early to have him see it. He was stunned and the two left the room for about ten minutes as they discussed what it meant and what to do about it; meanwhile I was stuck in the chair with my mouth swollen and in pain. After a while they came back in and simply continued to work ignoring the puffiness. By the next morning most of the swelling and pain had subsided.

But this now became a routine experience with every dentist visit, swollen gums, pain, and they just ignored it and continued working. One time during lunch a friend of mine was talking about the horror of having a tooth drilled when he had gone in for a dental visit. The other kids oohed and aahed and I brought up that my least favorite part of the dentist visit was the swelling gums. I just got curious looks back and I didn't bring it up again.

Also around this time, my scalp started itching and the scratching brought flakes and I was given my own medicated shampoo to use from then on.

When I had my first allergist appointment in my twenties, they used glycerin as a control to compare against the reactions to known allergens I would next be tested with. But the 'control' turned red and swelled up and the assistant got the doctor and the doctor came in and marveled that I was one of the very rare people who was allergic to glycerin! And so I was placed on the watch to find and avoid products using glycerin. It turned out most all shampoos and dental creams used it and once I found the very few that didn't, my itchy scalp problems went away and at dental office visits, now using a glycerin-free polish for my tooth cleaning, my gums no longer swelled-up and hurt.

But this knowledge in my twenties didn't help me at the end of fourth grade. Was the teacher periodically cleaning the desks in the class with something that had glycerin in it? I will never know as I can't go back in time and see.

But there is one thing I am sure of, by June of Nineteen Seventy-Four I had a newer and much more extensive rash covering my arms, legs and torso and I was back to the doctor's. He diagnosed it as heat rash, this time, due to mother keeping me in the long sleeved sweat shirts into the beginning of Summer. Now I was cursed with the opposite cure of having to wear nothing but shorts for the next week to allow my heat rash covered body the chance to 'breathe' and heal on its own. With the obvious rash and wearing nothing to cover it, I ended up trapped at home and not seeing any friends for the week.

I felt like a total freak, fortunately it was only for that week and I was then able to go back to jeans and a tee for the rest of the Summer!

I found out by the early nineteen nineties why the steroidal cream hadn't worked, but that's a long story for another day.

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