The Gifts of Psoriasis
“A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person only has one,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
When I heard Secretary Kennedy say this, I realized that it instantly summed up the last 5 years of my life. When you are unhealthy, you don't have the time to dream about anything else other than getting back to a state of health.
Other than limping my business along, I have had no other dreams to pursue other than understanding and getting to the root cause of the psoriasis I've experienced in a severe form since my parents became ill and died.
One of the reasons I'm writing daily is to unpack for myself the mental, spiritual, and physical issues that led me to me having this experience.
Physically, for me, it started in a less severe way 27 years ago right after I had my gallbladder removed due to a large stone. I was 30, and was told that it must come out.
I believed the physician, didn't question her and out it came. Within a couple of weeks, I started experiencing a rash around my neck and armpits that wouldn't go away.
These rashes would stay for a long time, then just mysteriously disappear. I saw a couple of dermatologists about it, and they just prescribed steroid creams, but no real answers to why it was happening.
The gift was that I started to realize that most medical experts were good at diagnosing so that they could prescribe pharmaceuticals, but weren't interested in getting to the bottom of the problem. I didn't really get any diagnosis, because I had never heard it described as inverse psoriasis until a few years ago.
When I broke out in a full body rash 5 years ago, I went to a new dermatologist and it was definitively diagnosed. Now I had a name. And he wanted to immediately put me on injections. Something within yelled NO and I've been on quite the journey since I turned away from that line of treatment.
I instead chose to go my own way. I'm the one experiencing it from the inside out, and I knew intuitively that it was somehow connected to my emotions and what was going on with my gut.
The gift here was that in my early 50's, I drastically changed my diet, lost about 45 pounds and other than the flares, I'm healthier now than I've ever been as an adult.
Another gift is my sense of vanity about my appearance is greatly reduced. One of the things that I was known for was 'my beautiful skin'. This was a difficult gift to accept. I won't lie about that. I also had great hair. During the first couple of flairs, I lost over half my hair and my scalp was a mess. I was about to seriously investigate getting a wig, but my diet started turning things around.
I have long hair now because I can. Psoriasis has taught me that things can change in an instant and enjoy what you have now.
The next gift is self-discipline. I wasn't known previously for self-discipline, which is why I was almost 50 pounds overweight. But to date, I've not had any cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, seed oils, wheat/gluten, alcohol, or nightshades for 5 years.
Eating out is challenging. I usually only go out to Asian restaurants and eat sushi on lunch dates. I cook everything from scratch, and consume very limited processed foods. A processed food would be a rice noodle, or an IQ bar. I also drink Almond Malk occasionally, but there's only three ingredients in it. That's it.
The other form of self-discipline I've developed is exercise regularity along with using my imagination in a positive way. Every morning during a flare, I get in the shower, even though it can be excruciating, and I run my hands along my skin, imagining no bumps or plaques. I keep myself in high spirits with an understanding of the long game I'm playing as it pertains to self-awareness and trust in myself.
I've been working with a functional nutritionist for the last 7 months and up until a few weeks ago, I was clear. Then, all of a sudden, I wasn't.
This was crushing. But the next gift psoriasis has given me is knowing a setback is an opportunity to learn something new about this affliction, digest the information and make some changes based on something objective.
I am pretty confident that the root of my particular manifestation of this disease is an inability to properly digest fat since I don't have a gallbladder. Without a gallbladder, my body makes do with whatever trickle of bile my liver produces.
I have to think about my fat intake, digestive enzymes, sunflower lecithin, beneficial bacteria, Strep, and a host of other things that are downstream from having an organ removed.
I won't get into the details here, as there are too many for a daily post, but this health detour has shaped me in ways that I would never have expected.
This is my place to begin to unpack living with a chronic condition that is the gift that keeps on giving, and understand for myself 'why me'.
Random fact about me: The one tool I don't have that I really want is a metal detector.