Eczema and Hope ….my first ever blog post…. Everyone keeps telling me I need to write a blog. Blogging is an essential part of having a modern, on-line business…. I keep thinking, I don’t have time to blog. But in reality, I have time to spend 15 minutes here and there looking at other people’s holiday photos on Facebook. Hmm she didn’t get very brown, did she? I have time to re-organise my 6 year old’s knicker drawer in to “spotty pants” and “plain pants”. I have time to watch an episode of Friends I have probably seen about 12 times. So blogworld, here I am. Apologies if I’ve not quite got it right. Practice makes perfect.
What shall I blog about?
Well as my aim in blogging is to attract more people to my website and to encourage people to understand my eczema story, I will start with a moment in time about 7½ years ago which made me realise something.
I’m talking about Christmas Day 2005. On this day I looked down at my hands and realised something. But before we get to that, I’ll give you a brief rundown on where I was, emotionally, at that time. I was 32 years old, happily married, but unhappily employed in a stressful and demanding sales and marketing role. I was also trying to get pregnant but that is a whole other blogging story. My eczema (which appeared on my hands when I was 18 years old sitting my A levels) had been making my life a bit miserable and a bit tricky.
In the preceding months my hands had been covered, and I mean COVERED front and back in heaving red and purple tiny blisters which popped, oozed sticky yellow stuff, crusted over, cracked, bled, blistered again etc; they felt like they were permanently on fire. I would lie awake at night waiting for my husband to go to sleep so I could scratch, and I mean, scratch, I would scratch them until they bled. I would rub them violently with a towel until there was hardly any skin left, because it was the only thing that would ease the burning pain.
Then the stinging and throbbing would start and I would cry. There were days when I couldn’t hold the steering wheel because it just hurt too much. I couldn’t wash my own hair, my husband had to do it for me. I had to wear cotton white gloves which stuck to my hands. It was a struggle to go on, but you get the idea.
This is just my hands; I’m going to talk about my face eczema in another blog.
In October 2005 I started having acupuncture with an amazing woman called Gus. She opened my eyes to the whole concept of “holistic health” that is, in a nutshell, looking after your whole body, not just visiting your GP and sticking a cream on it. It’s about prevention, understanding the cause, not just treating the symptoms. She guessed that as my eczema was pretty severe, it would take a while to see improvements, but I was going to stick with it. I was sick of people looking at my hands in disgust, or asking with a weird look on their face, “What’s wrong with your hands?” and I was sick of being in pain. Yes, eczema doesn’t just look gross, it is painful.
So on Christmas Day on 2005 I woke up and saw that after 8 weeks of acupuncture, of trying to eat better, of trying to chill out and cope with the stress, my hands were looking different. I saw that underneath the very damaged skin was something new, there was normal skin. It was pink and delicate and soft. It looked too delicate, but it was good skin, it did not have blisters and cracks. I looked down that morning at my hands and I saw hope.
It wasn’t until 2009 that I had moved much further down the holistic health and wellness route that I decided to ditch the horrible job and retrain in aromatherapy, but that morning still sticks in my mind because it was then that I realised that I was making me better and I was finally on the right road.
If you are reading this and it feels familiar, please take a big deep breath and tell yourself that you are going to make yourself well. We all have the power to make our own lives better, in lots of little ways.
Now treat yourself to one of my gorgeous handmade organic skincare and beauty products (www.lj-natural.com), because now you know I’ve been on a journey, and every one of my products is made with not just love, but hope.
Lisa Johnson
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