When the steroids stop
All good things come to an end. I had to stop taking the steroids sooner or later or I would start to look like one of those sprinters of indeterminate gender.
It was fun while it lasted, and came in really handy when my friend fixed me up on a dinner date with an older man. When the conversation hit a lull I mentioned that I was on prednisolone and we were away. You couldn’t shut us up. He had been on it for three months, because of a bladder operation, which rather trumped me, but it was still terribly jolly trading stories about side effects.
It was with great sadness, therefore, that I popped the last little 1mg pill at the end of my decreasing regime. When the mad itching started right on cue a day later, as the dermatologist warned me it would, I made an appointment to go back to discuss with him the ominous-sounding business of what he called ‘managing the condition’.
The dermatologist is getting the hang of me now. The first time I burst into his wood-panelled consulting room ranting about my itchy hands and feet he seemed rather taken aback.
‘Now look here,’ I said, ‘I don’t care if it is common practice not to cure eczema because of some bizarre secret experiment being carried out by the pharmaceutical barons and the FBI. I need you to tell me you can break the rules and cure mine.’
So he stuck his nose in his medical directory and wrote out a prescription for pills and creams that filled an entire page of A4.
After the steroids ran out, I was in such a huff to get in to see him I catapulted out of the black cab as it pulled up in Harley Street and proceeded to fall flat on my face in the road.
I rolled around a bit then picked myself up, not noticing I had smashed my elbow — truly, if I had been flattened by a truck, I still would only have been able to feel my hands and feet itching. I stormed into the hushed reception area with its ornate coffee tables covered in carefully fanned copies of The Lady and Yachting World.
The nice Irish lady behind the antique desk looked up with alarm. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked with a kindly lilt to her voice which only sent me further into the stratosphere of annoyance.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said, throwing myself down on one of the posh settees with a gasp. She picked up the phone and muttered something. ‘He’ll see you now,’ she said, eyeing me suspiciously as I smeared my grazed elbow across the Chippendale.
Once in front of the dermi (as we eczema folk like to say), I dissolved immediately into an emotional puddle which I hoped he would realise he had no hope of ever clearing out of his office unless he at least attempted to stop it itching.
He was fabulously calm, put his nose back in his medical directory and came up with a new cream that would do something clever to the nerve endings.
A few hours later, I was in the middle of a particularly bad prickling session when my friend Sarah rang. ‘I can’t talk now, I’m too busy itching.’ ‘Ooh,’ said Sarah excitedly, ‘have you tried Coir matting? You can scrape your feet up and down it. It’s really good.’
‘No, you don’t understand, I’m trying not to scratch. I’ve just spent another £100 on prescription charges for that very purpose. I’m smeared in hardcore pharmaceuticals.’ Sarah, who has had dermatitis on and off for years, was unrepentant. ‘Give in to it,’ she said huskily, like the devil incarnate, ‘give in to it and scratch.’
This was deeply shocking at first, but then it struck me that, as I had tried every other strategy and none had worked, maybe scratching wasn’t that bad an idea. I’m all for the counterintuitive. ‘Well, if you think I should…’
‘Of course you should,’ said Sarah, sounding like Linda Blair having one of her turns in The Exorcist. ‘Have you got any natural floor-covering anywhere in your house?’
I suddenly remembered I had a sea-grass runner in the hallway. Standing on it gingerly I pushed my feet back and forwards: ‘Ooooooh!’ I badly needed someone to tell me to stop, but Sarah said, ‘How good is that? Wait a minute, I’m going to have a go…’
‘Please tell me you’re not doing the same thing,’ I said, but it was all too obvious that she was. ‘Oooooooh, yes!’ she was moaning down the phone.
‘Stop it, no, we mustn’t!’ I shouted. ‘Go on! You know you want to,’ she groaned back. It was hopeless. We were both going to scratching hell.
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