Hi.
It’s been a strange week. Last Wednesday, I did my first self-injection of a new-ish treatment called Dupixent that’s meant to bring some degree of normalcy to my skin. Every two weeks now I’ll be injecting this into my (fortunately voluminous) sides. In theory, the side effects are extremely minimal. That’s unusual for this kind of a treatment, but hey, I’ll take it.
The first thing I noticed, less than 48 hours after the injection, was that my skin had oil in it. I’ve had incredibly dry, crepe-like skin for some time now which is almost certainly contributing to my situation. Quite suddenly, I mean jarringly so, my skin felt…normal. Nicole noticed it as well. That was cool.
As far as the healing goes, it’s hard to tell. It’s getting better very slowly, or perhaps getting worse very slowly, or maybe staying exactly the same at a very high rate. I think there’s some healing going on. My “canaries”, the things that flare up first, seem to be doing better. I am cautiously optimistic.
The bad news is that this is not a cure. What we’re hoping for is just keeping the condition in check. So there’s no end to the treatment. If it works, though, then it’s well worth it. Hopefully it will remain so to my insurance company.
We did wind up having an absolutely lovely Valentine’s weekend. This may sound a little nekulturny, but we decided to stay in the first evening because we got a peach of a parking space and didn’t want to lose it. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to get things delivered these days. We got a feast-full of fruit, cheese, bread, and meats as well as some wine and didn’t miss going out at all.
It helped that the hotel room in The Lumen was embarrassingly large. It was bigger than our apartment, with a monstrous “living room” area that had a hanging 55” TV. Both sides of the place had floor-to-ceiling windows and the bathroom was appropriately decadent. I also ordered a Chromecast because I wanted one, but they are of no use in hotels that have decent network security (device isolation is a good thing, mind you) unless you want to put too much effort into it.
For our Big Night Out, we had reservations at Fearing’s which was a fairly typical pinkie-up kind of experience. We went full-on costumey with our attire. I went with my banded collar suit because I always do, with a bright red collarless shirt. Nicole…how do I describe this? A platinum wig with a backless red dress featuring a scandalous neckline, a fur wrap and a jeweled broach. Add to that picture the most sparkliest of lip and eye makeup and some seriously sparkly heels and you’re in the neighborhood. The food didn’t quite live up to our get-ups, but we make a spectacular couple. Mind you, she would have been spectacular on her own.
One brief work related thing: When my office does big events, there are usually custom t-shirts or hoodies created for everyone who attends. I have never been able to wear any of these because they would likely make my skin fall off. This year, they went out of their way and got me a jacket by a brand I can actually wear. It’s one of the coolest things they’ve ever done. Seriously. I let the Big Bosses know how much I appreciated their doing this. To protect the innocent (and the somewhat less-than-innocent as I’ve known these folks for a long time), I won’t name names, but y’all get the idea.
-RK