How It All Began

I really have SO MUCH to say regarding my health and I just want to put it all in one post. However, that would be an extremely long post so please bear with me as I organize my thoughts and hopefully have it all make sense. I figured a good way to start would be to start from the very beginning of how my "Autoimmune Storm" started. Fair warning: this post contains embarrassing pictures of gross skin.

Growing up, I always had beautiful fair skin. My friends would always tell me how they wished they had my clear skin. I never dealt with bad acne, only the occasional random pimples. I never had a strict skin care routine. I bought whatever cleanser was on sale at CVS, and rarely ever used moisturizer on my face. At the beginning of August 2013, I started to get this red, bumpy, raw, flaky skin around my mouth.  At first I didn't think much of it figuring it was probably from the sun.

A month or so goes by, and it didn't start to get any better. A family friend who happens to be a doctor looked at my face and said he believed it was Perioral Dermatitis. He told me about his friend Sarah, who also has PD. I immediately watched her video and read all her blog posts related to PD.  The next day I ordered some of her Osmia Organics Products. I used them religiously, just how the packaging said to. I started to become obsessed with researching everything and anything about PD. As months went by, my skin continued to be the same. It varied day to day what it looked like. Some days I would wake up and it would look almost unnoticeable. Other days it seemed to have gotten increasingly worse overnight. 

              

During this time I changed every. single. product. that I was putting on my face, body, and hair (topic for another post!). In December 2013, I finally reached a point where I needed more information and help. I no longer felt comfortable going outside my house. I was self conscious, embarrassed and basically humiliated with how I looked. That may sound dramatic to some but, it really affected my day to day life.  I made an appointment with a dermatologist… the only problem being was that the earliest appointment was in March. March, people! A whole three more months of looking and feeling like crap. And what would you know, in those three months my skin got SO MUCH WORSE. I hid under hats and scarfs and tried my hardest to cover it up with make-up (which I DO NOT recommend now but, there's no way in hell I was going out in public looking like this). 

               

March finally came around, and the dermatologist tells me pretty much everything I knew already. I had perioral dermatitis, which is a cross between eczema and acne, and it is treated with topical or oral antibiotics and/or steroid creams. I wanted to avoid using steroids creams because everything I researched and read said your skin can get dependent on them, meaning it is likely PD can occur again after treatment with steroid creams. My dermatologist took cultures of my skin and it happened to be infected. This was by far the worst my skin has ever looked and thank god it was during Spring break because if it looked like this when I had school and clinical, there is no way I would have gone. I ended up on antibiotics for two weeks, which cleared up all the disgusting yellow crust but, it did not cure my PD. She also gave me a prescription for Hydrocortisone cream, which I was pretty positive I was not going to use. She advised me to not use anything on my skin; no make up, no soap, nothing. She told me to rinse my face with warm water. I left the appointment thinking, "This lady is crazy. No make-up, no soap, and just water? Doesn't she know I just spent valuable time researching the best products for my skin, and emptying my bank account in the process? I am a poor college student after all!" 

The year 2014 continued to pass and my skin continued to stay the same. Everything I was doing and changing was just not working for me. I eventually caved into using the steroids cream simply because I was in nursing school, where I had presentations, group projects, class and clinical to attend. Not to mention, I am in my early twenties and enjoy having a social life.  It was the best decision I made. My skin finally starting to clear up! I had to be consistent with using the Hydrocortisone cream because if I didn't use it for a day or two, my skin started to flare up. I would put it on at night before I went to bed. If I didn't have class or needed to be anywhere, I would use it twice a day. I carried that damn little tube with me everywhere! I no longer cared about all those articles and blog posts telling me not to use steroids creams because I was finally comfortable going outside of my house without people staring at me like a smashed a tomato around my mouth.

Almost a year  and a half later, my skin looks completely different from all the above photos. It is almost like I have my old beautiful skin back! I found a good balance between using the steroid cream sparingly, and sticking to lifestyle modifications. I want to make it clear that my skin did not get better just because I was using steroid cream. There are a lot of factors that I attribute to how my skin improved, most being medicine I am on for my other autoimmune diseases. However, I did change a lot of my daily routine related to hair, skin, and diet, which played a major role as well. I am really looking forward to sharing all my tips and tricks related to how my skin went from looking like all those above photos to… 

this! If you told me two years ago that I would be sharing a picture of my face without make-up on the Internet I would have told you, you were crazy.

So, in a nutshell that is how my "Autoimmune Storm" began. It has been quite the journey and I learn new things regarding my skin every day.

Question

•  Do you suffer from perioral dermatitis or any other type of skin condition?
• What do you do to manage it?