Topical Steroid Withdrawal - Day 13

Foot has improved a lot, still on moisturizer withdrawal, but it's itchy as hell and I've opened up some new wounds :-(  It'll probably need to go through another few zombie cycles from the looks of things.

My skin is starting to dry out in some places but it is still insanely itchy.  This tsw flare has gone on for almost 2 weeks now.  I was hoping my flare would only last 2 weeks and I would start to heal, but it looks like this flare is payback for all those years of topical steroid abuse.

Neck is still itchy and it's push down towards my upper chest area, it's especially itchy around the collarbone area.  My upper abdomen was quite itchy as well as is my inner thigh.  Hell it's all itchy lol.

TSW Day 13 - 2014-04-13

   

Topical Steroid Withdrawal - Day 7

On Day 7, I had to leave work early and go home.  I was feeling terrible.  My office's heating system is really messed up and it was 29.5C indoors!   I had a fever and crashed when I got home.   My parents came by later that day to see how I was doing.   I was popping a few ibuprofen to deal with not only the fever but also the inflammation.   My dad helped me take those pictures of my back which are really hard for me to take myself.  The red patches were spreading to my neck.  I must have had a field day on my arms the night before because they were bloodied :(

Day 7 - 2014-04-07  Eczema is spreading

Topical Steroid Withdrawal - Day 6

I stopped using all topical steroids on April 1st, 2014.

After reading up on topical steroid withdrawal and watching videos of people who successfully beat this thing, I rationalized that my body was trying to have a flare, but I was suppressing it by using betamethasone.  I stopped using topical steroids cold turkey hoping it would allow my the flare to continue on its own.   And boy did the flare did resume!  Almost immediately the day after the itching and burning started.   At around this time, I started seeing a traditional Chinese medicine doctor and he thought my foot might have some fungal infection (athlete's foot) in addition to the eczema because he saw some circular patterns.  Of course I was also given some foul medicine to brew and drink twice daily.  That stuff makes me fart all the time and the farts smell pretty horrible.   The chinese doc gave me a TCM antifungal cream, that cream burned my foot and it caused the skin on my foot to crack.   I stopped using the cream on my foot (it hurt too much) and let the thing dry out, the TCM doctor did say to let it dry out to avoid bacterial infection.

It was around this time that I was reading about moisturizer withdrawal (MW) on the ITSAN.org forums and how it can speed recovery.  The theory behind MW makes a lot of sense.  The skin needs to form a scab to recover but moisturizer prevents the skin from doing so.  Furthermore, using moisturizers is apparently not a great thing to do because it tricks the skin into thinking it doesn't need to produce/retain its own moisture anymore, which is what leads to further eczema.   

I cleaned my foot with isopopyl alcohol (which helps dry the skin and is anti-baterial).  You can see my foot looks pretty bad, it really scared me at first because it looked like a zombie, the dry skin was initially really painful, but after a while I would get used to the pain and the skin became stronger and the scabs would lessen.  I was itching and burning all over, my foot was the least of my areas of concern now.  

2014-04-06