conquer my skin issues

Tonight my mom, little sister, Gabe, Shawn and I went out to eat. At one point these two nice women approach us to gush over Shawn and Gabriel, and the one asks me (probably against her better judgement) “How old are you?!” I told her and she looked a bit shocked and said “You look 15!”

I got that another time when I was grocery shopping, and as I was checking out, the cashier told me I was “too young!” to have had Gabriel (who was a baby). I said “I’m 21!”

(I know women are generally waiting til they are older nowadays, but come on!!!)

I suppose this should be flattering, but I kind of wonder if it’s my bad skin that makes me look like a teenager.

I happened to go to my old geocities site the other night – good thing too, coz geocities is closing at the end of the year so now I’ve moved all my old files – and I didn’t have this when I was 15-18. What happened? Even in my wedding photos I don’t have this. It was only afterwards. Am I allergic to Tommy or something? (Did losing my virginity have something to do with it!? lol!)

Not that I’m by any means ugly now, but I was SO PRETTY back then! I WANT THAT BACK! Here is an example from when I was 17.

And then the other day my mom sent me an email with a link to someone’s blog about her experience with rosacea. She related that she had spent over $5000 on treatments for her rosacea, from creams and pills to laser therapy. Either nothing happened (don’t I know how that feels…) or it made it worse. She was promoting this website here.

I got the pop up box that offered me $10 off and I mean, you see these kind of websites around, and I always rolled my eyes at them… but this time, I thought oh why not! I spent double that on a stupid “acne” cream that did absolutely NOTHING. Maybe this is finally “it”. I’ve become increasingly distrustful of doctors and Big Pharma in general, and the line “conventional treatments do nothing to fight the root cause of rosacea – they merely “patch up” the problem and try to reduce severity” sold me. I’ve been a supporter of homeopathic medicine for as long as I can remember, and that is exactly how homeopathic medicine works.

So I bought the pdf!

I’m not promoting the website QUITE yet… but what I read (the pdf isn’t even 30 pages long and most of it is his own experience) makes TOTAL sense. This might just be “it”. I’ll keep you posted. (:

5 months ago and since then, my face has been pretty decent to me. A bit of dry skin here and there, but it was winter after all. I wonder if I’ll have the same hormonal outbreak as I near the end of the pregnancy, or was that a one time, only with Gabriel thing?

This has been thankfully very far from my mind, and it’s not bothering me. I hope it keeps up this way.

Some thoughts:

First off, any WoW fans out there? (World of Warcraft to all of you going ”...no?” lol)

In the game, the race known as the night elves have facial markings that vary. Some are just around the eyes, some are more on the cheeks. I happened to be thinking about them one night… and it kind of hit me. I am going to pretend my rosacea is simply a throwback to my elven heritage!

Okay, not really, but take a look and tell me what you think.

(Cute story to anyone who might read this and get a kick out of it: Once I was playing on the Alliance side, at a very low level, when out of nowhere this level 60 Undead comes around the corner and we practically ran into each other. My character was female, and he was a male, so I thought ”...why not…” I stripped off all my armor and clothes down to my underwear and top and started “dancing” with him. He didn’t kill me, though it would have been so easy for him. Instead, he blew me a kiss and ran off down the road in the direction I had just come. LOL!!! I couldn’t believe a bit of harmless flirting worked!)

I’ve caught the cold that seems to be going around mercilessly right now. It seems to have affected my rosacea, too, because my skin was really itchy and flaking last night, and then later it was sore.

I remember when I was pregnant with Gabriel it REALLY hurt a lot, especially toward the end months. In fact, during the baby and bridal shower thrown for my sister and I a week before Gabriel’s birth, there is a photo taken of me where my face is just so red it hurts to look at it even now.

And yet that wasn’t ENTIRELY the pregnancy. During pregnancy, a woman’s body IS warmer than other times (one more reason to have a spring baby… keeps you warmer during the winter! :P) but for a few months before Gabe was conceived, it finally got bad enough I grudgingly went to see a doctor for the dermatologist reference. If anything, since then it has went down… I’m starting to wonder just how much pregnancy DOES factor into it, if at all, because up til now… things were behaving surprisngly reasonably. (Granted I’ve been too tired to keep track of what day it is… but still, lol.)

This is certainly the thorn in my side, but I remind myself how many other things I could have, and, given the option to choose what I’d like “wrong” with me, I can’t come up with anything else I’d like in place. I could have a weight problem, I could have diabetes, I could have depression or other mental issues, I could be infertile… Yes, please, I’ll take the rosacea!!!!

Tetracycline is out. According to Safe Fetus, tetracycline is positive for causing birth defects during pregnancy.IF it was life threatening to go off the medication, it is an acceptable risk, but because rosacea is hardly life threatening, I can’t risk it. I’m not intending to get pregnant, and NFP works great, but accidents happen regardless, AND it is excreted into my breastmilk.

Oh well… How does Marvin the Martian put it? “Back to the drawing board…”

I think I’ll still go to a doctor and ask about my other options… or just wait until I can afford the seabuck thorn, and perhaps some foundation to cover it up on my bad days.

Still… how disapointing!

My coworker and I were talking last night. Her husband has rosacea and has been on – I might spell this wrong – tetracycline, an antibiotic, for years for his rosacea. It hasn’t cured him, but it keeps his skin clear. He takes two pills a day, one in the morning and one at night. I absolutely loathe the idea of being on an antibiotic for literally the rest of my life, but my coworker explained that it is a very very gentle antibiotic _{(so I don’t have to worry about recurring yeast infections)} and has no side effects at all.

She explained that in the long run I couldwill develop a “bulbous” nose. Not maybe, but will, and that is just a long range effect of having rosacea. She said it is frustrating how many people don’t know what it is, and by that she meant DOCTORS, too! She was very kind and encouraged me to see a doctor and get on it.

So… I don’t want to be on an antibiotic for the rest of time, but I also realize how much this hurts me. It’s irritating, tight and even painful at times. What I thought was acne on my chin isn’t, but actually another aspect of my rosacea. If I was diabetic, I would absolutely NOT hesititate to take care of myself and take whatever medicine I must. If I had depression, I would RUN to the doctor and pursue whatever alternative measures, too. So no more hesitating. It’s off to the doctor for me.

I know that there is a natural treatment called Sea Buckthorn (Or Seabuck Thorn, not sure on the spelling) available at the health food store… but it is currently out of my price range. Maybe once I am on this tetracycline and I can afford it, I can also encourage healthy skin with the seabuck thorn, too.

Wow… the prospect of having good skin is intoxicating! I’ve always been very pretty, and I’m not camera shy, but with rosacea I haven’t had a photo taken since last November. Regardless of my (very high) self esteem, rosacea has certainly taken its toll on my confidence.

I can hardly wait…

I restarted on medication and then decided it wasn’t worth it, so I stopped using it again right away.

I also looked around for some of the other treatments that had been mentioned to me in my comments by the kind 43Thing users that know what I’m going through.

And then… something funny happened.

I stopped using shampoo, using the baking soda method known as (and I still shudder when I refer to it as this) “no ‘poo” and… miraculously my face improved.

I would also splash a bit of the baking soda liquid across my face, and I noticed that almost immeadiately my face was softer where it was always rough and sore.

I still have flare ups, for sure! I just got over one, but it goes down faster and more surely now. At first I thought it was just spring time, an “in between” time, just like in October.

I can live with this. It’s not bad at all. I’m still not ready to mark it off my list as completed… but I can see where it will be soon. That feeling, if nothing else, of hope is comforting.

Back to medication again…

My skin is doing much much better. I woke up one morning about 6 weeks ago and everything just looked great! No more bright red patches, no more rough, sore areas, just contented looking skin with it’s back-to-normal imperfections.

The first thing I did was rejoice! lol! I wanted to be in photos again for the first time in… Well… I can’t remember, so that alone gives you an idea! Now that I think, though, the last photo I had taken that was “share worthy” was April of ‘06…

So I told myself that I would mark this as done after awhile.

Well, lol, “awhile” came and went. It got me thinking… how do I really know if I have conquered my skin issues? I’m fine with never having perfect, or even “clear” skin. To have clear skin was my original goal, and I changed it to this because I realized this is really all I want. If you look in larger photos of my, you can see the pink spots on my cheeks, and the pimples that lie dormant along my jawbone…. rather like volcanos! lol!

But what if this is temporary? What if in March I’m back to where I started, or even worse? That’s not really conquering anything, it’s just delaying the rebellion, so to speak. The uprising, the – okay, I’ll stop now.

Seriously, though, I did view this kind of as “going to war”. I’ve NEVER been the kind of wage any kind of war on my body -EVER – but this was getting to be enough already.

If it does comeback full force, I’ve recieved some VERY helpful comments in the past few months on here; others sharing what works for them, so at least I’ll know where to start.

But for now… the battle appears to be over… But I’ll just keep waiting a bit longer to declare complete “peace”.

All was going wonderful, happy positivity and such… and then I break out. big sigh

There is a silver lining, however. This is pimples, not the broken blood vessels. I don’t look like the nutcracker!

I’ve been off the medication for a week now and everything is going great! How wonderful! A few more weeks of success and I can mark this as done!