Get up, come on get down with the sickness
Get up, come on get down with the sickness
Get up, come on get down with the sickness
-Distrurbed, “Down with the Sickness” from The Sickness
A few times in the last couple of weeks I’ve told people about the ordeal I had with a doctor making a terrible choice while I was living in Michigan, and since every time I bring it up people sort of balk, I dug up a few old photos to add to the story here.
So the tl;dr first for once (does that make it tl;ngr?): I am allergic to sulfa based drugs. They cause a condition in me called hypersensitive vasculitis. It nearly manifested as Stephens-Johnson syndrome.
Here’s a picture of some of it.
That’s an early photo of my leg. As you can see, there are numerous red spots sort of puffing up. Those spots are places where histamine has caused my blood vessels to dissolve, essentially, and my body is leaking plasma and histamine into my skin. it also causes extreme joint pain and inflammation. It’s a condition that cannot be repaired. You have to just let your skin and blood vessels re-grow from whatever depth down the damage is to the surface, and any time you re-irritate it, you have to start over. It took me seven total months because I tried to teach once (a day where I set myself back dramatically and put these terrible ridge-like pits into my arms by leaning on a podium), and then about a month and a half later I went to defend my dissertation prospectus and even with my feet up managed to pretty much destroy every single part of my leg from the knee down and the tops of my hands.
This all happened to me because I had a small rash on my leg and went to the medial center to keep it from getting worse, something that I’d never have done except that I had medical insurance for the first time in my life and thought I should be a little more responsible. The doctor who saw me at the health center– who wasn’t my normal doctor– thought it was MERSA and gave me a megadose of Bactrim to knock it out. Then… he thought the MERSA got worse (it was the vasculitis– I guess the meds killed whatever my actual rash was). So he sent me to a dermatologist. The dermatologist never considered me being allergic to the Bactrim, so she had me keep taking it and did a biopsy. She put me on the immune protocol diet and gave me various steroid creams. It was a spooky time. I actually thought I was dying (turns out I was at a risk of that), and more than once I broke down sobbing uncontrollably because I couldn’t do much of anything.
When my regular doctor came back, he took one look, knew it was from the Bactrim, and took me off it. He also seemed very, very concerned and told me not to walk around, not to lean on things, not to put any pressure on my skin. He did some tests. He put me on at least three meds to aid in healing.
He would tell me later– about three months later– that he wasn’t sure I was going to survive and was glad I was recovering. Apparently if the condition gets worse, it gets into your internal organs and slowly starts breaking the walls of those down, too. He was afraid that I’d been on the medication so long that the disorder wold get to my kidneys, my liver, or even my heart. Luckily for me, it didn’t.
So because I had a small rash about the size of a quarter, my substitute doctor did this to me:
And people wonder why I am a little leery of going to the doctor for little things.
90% or so of the damage healed. If you ever see me and look closely at my forearms, you can see the telltale pattern of the scarring from the burst-vessel blisters (I had to put pressure on my forearms to type lying on my stomach, so they were the least spared part of my body), and there are a few on my legs. But the itching and the leaky blood vessels and such are all a thing of the past. I also know how to chart the death of all my skin cells to be renewed. It takes a little over 2.5 months for me to grow a whole new skin. That’s about double the supposed human average.
The amusing irony is that while I was bed ridden by this, I continued to do my graduate studies and taught a class (online, but I taught my class none-the-less). I also had a book chapter published. But the next year, in spite of being ahead of my plan of study, I was told on my student annual review that I wasn’t productive that year. LOL.
But yeah, when I tell people I almost died during my dissertation, I don’t mean metaphorically, and I don’t mean from the hard work of the research or the writing. I mean because of a month-long cycle of the highest dose of a medication I was allergic to and the fallout to my poor, poor skin.