Let’s start this one off with a content warning for body horror descriptions.
I was going to make this a P.S., but I wanted it right here at the top of the post: Nicole has been a goddamned angel of mercy this weekend. She’s taken such incredibly good care of me and taken care of all the house things and even prodded me when I wasn’t doing the best thing for myself. The fermented cabbage juice/probiotic was a bit much, but in the big scheme of things, it does nothing to reduce my gratitude. She loves me, even when my face is such a mess. I’m terribly lucky.
For those of you who haven’t followed my general well-being with rapt attention, good on you. I’m presuming you have a rich, full life that in no way involves memorizing the peculiar ailments of strangers. However, a little bit of backstory is required for this to make any sense, so bear with me.
I have a Skin Thing. I can’t put a proper label on it as three doctors have yet to make heads or tails of why my skin will just stop being skin and start being a collection of portals linking the dermis with the outside world. It started happening years ago and all we’ve determined with any certainty is that, while I am allergic to p-phenylene diamine, that alone doesn’t explain what’s going on. The allergist says it’s a skin condition. The dermatologist says it is likely one or more allergies. The GP’s guesses are best left unsaid. The other thing is that my condition goes away for about 2-3 months after getting a steroid shot. So, that’s what I’ve been doing to keep it in check.
This past Tuesday, I went in for my shot which is by now a routine. Wednesday and Thursday, I felt unusually warm and had started to develop tiny bumps on my elbows. By Friday evening, both arms were covered, as was my trunk and parts of my legs. More worryingly, my face had some of those tiny bumps and was slightly swollen.
Saturday was bad. By Saturday, my face resembled Deadpool’s -swollen, bumpy, seeping, and….yuck. I contacted my dermatologist, who, suspecting a bacterial infection (steroids leave you prone to infections), put me on a pretty serious antibiotic; the kind you take with a meal every 12 hours like clockwork.
Today was….worse. The whole of my face was covered in seeping gunk and the tried bits of it after they’d done their seeping. It was bad enough that I contacted my doctor again with one of the most appalling selfies I’ve ever taken. She regarded it as a Not-At-All-Good Condition and called in a prescription for some prednisone, which is, as they say in the business, serious shit.
So here it is Sunday night. I’m not going to work tomorrow for obvious reasons. I’ll be in the doctor’s office by 9 AM-ish after what I expect to be a poor night’s rest. The tide seems to have been stemmed; I don’t see my face or any other part of me getting worse. There’s no improvement, either. The weird thing is that I feel fine. My skin is just garbage right now and I do not feel pretty.
P.S. I’d intended to turn my enforced housebound state into some overly dramatic, sentimental music but alas and dammit, my audio interface seems to have completely stopped doing anything beyond powering up. My computer doesn’t recognize the USB connection, and none of my instruments can make the line-level lights dance at all. It’s under warranty, or it would be, had I registered it. We’ll see what Behringer has to say about it. Maybe there’s a magic reset switch, but I doubt it. Of all the soul-destroying events of the weekend, this was probably the worst. I just wanted to sit in front of my shattered interface and mumble “It’s not fair….it’s not fair.” Oh well, at least my glasses still work.