Wearing my patches with Pride!

Now that I'm in my mid 30's and have lived with psoriasis for 31 years now I can look back at my life and see what impact having the condition has made on who I am as a person.

As an adult I have been lucky to be confident enough in my extra skin to have never felt depressed or socially isolated because of it.  Growing up with the condition and having a very supportive family have helped me to realise that, even when I was being bullied, it was because of the lack of education that others had about psoriasis rather than anything I had done. I know there are many other people out there who do deal with depression and feelings of isolation on a daily basis because of their psoriasis and I wish there wasn't.  Not everyone feels comfortable showing off their extra layers of skin to the world and I can completely understand that but I can say from the bottom of my heart that doing so doesn't really make much difference to most adults out there.

Since I left home at the age of 17 to go to university I have never once hidden the fact that I have psoriasis.  At times my skin has been so bad that I had maybe about 20% of my total body surface free of plaques but I would still get my splotchy "milk bottle" arms and legs out in the summer sun.  The sun is good for treating psoriasis so covering up is not only uncomfortable on really hot sunny days but also the wrong thing to do. It took me being in a completely different area of the country to find this confidence and it all stemmed from a conversation with a really cute male student in my halls of residence...  He later became a boyfriend but we lost touch when he left to go to another university.

The conversation revolved around why I was always in cardigans and jumpers on what were really unusually warm autumn days in the north of Scotland.  When I said it was because I was embarrassed to show my arms because of my psoriasis his first request was to see them and then his first question after that was "What causes it?"...  That very first conversation with someone about why my skin looks patchy, red and flaky was a real eye opener.  Almost overnight my attitude changed.  I had spent so long being ridiculed for having psoriasis that this first encounter with someone who wanted to learn more changed my outlook and attitude completely.  That was the day I started wearing my patches with pride.

All these years later I have had a few relationships and now have a loving husband and a darling daughter who never notice my skin is different from theirs...  My daughter thought it strange that people didn't have psoriasis when she was younger, my skin being what she had always thought was "normal".  I have many close friends who don't seem to notice either, or if they have they have asked me to educate them about it.

I won't lie, I have had many treatments over the years to try to clear my skin and make it less painful.  I still use dovonex and also dovobet but I have had pUVA and UVB therapy and more coal tar treatments in hospital over the past few years.  The UVB worked amazingly, my skin cleared completely but sadly 3 months post treatment it came back.  The second round was not as effective as the first and now I have lovely, densely freckled areas on my arms and legs where the largest patches of psoriasis were.

The UVB therapy helped me in that it reduced the coverage of my psoriasis to a level that is manageable with topical ointments.  At one point I was having to use dovonex every 2 days so as not to use more than 100g in a week my skin was so badly covered. Now 60g of dovonex will last me up to 4 or 5 weeks.

Studying for a degree in Microbiology has given me great background to read through scientific papers that cover research being carried out into the causes and treatments of psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis and I use this to help educate my friends and family (or anyone else who happens to ask me about my skin) about the condition.  I would truly love to be able to educate people more, I know that there are still young kids out there who are going through the kind of childhood I had and teenagers struggling with socially defined beauty standards set to unattainable levels by magazines, pop stars and movie stars and while I am no model I'd love to do a "How to look good naked" type event with Gok Wan, just to show people that there's nothing wrong with having psoriasis.

I have one more blog entry to write about my life (so far) with Pso and PsA and that's about my 20 year battle to get diagnosis and treatment for psoriatic arthritis.  After that I plan on going into some depth about the underlying causes and biological processes that lead to both of these conditions.  The research for this will take quite a bit of time but I am aiming to have at least 2 posts a month on here.