Living With Psoriasis

It's winter. I'm stressed out. And it's time for the annual skin shedding ritual. I mean skin shedding literally because I live with a disease (fortunately very mild) known as Psoriasis.There are all kinds of gory tales that can be told about it. Most of which can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psoriasis
http://www.psoriaticdiseases.com/psoriaticdiseases http://www.drbatras.com/html/skin4.asp#psoriasis

Living with a chronic condition is never easy, as many will testify. To know that you're not completely normal or worse still, not completely healthy... It's not easy.

There's an uncertainity to it. You don't know when it will flare and why. You can't be sure whether you'll wake up in the morning and see a new lesion somewhere. If you'll run your hands through your hair you might just find that you're losing hair because the condition has worsened. If you run your nails on your scalp, you might just draw blood.

There's a lot of embarressment attached to Psoriasis. You might go to get a haircut only to hear the beautician suggest her new anti-dandruff treatment. You then have to patiently explain that it's a skin condition but it's not contagious. You might wake up one morning to see the entire pillow covered with flakes. You would probably drape your jacket on your black chair at work because people would otherwise identify your chair as the one with all the white flakes on it.

There are a lot of restrictions. You don't eat things with too much protein, you try to not get stressed, you take medication everyday, you put up with smelly coal tar preparations, you have a propensity to get a lot of other skin infections because immunity is low, you don't wear dark coloured clothes on days when you have a flare because it would look terrible...

It's not easy to admit that you have psoriasis. That's the trouble with most skin ailments, I suppose. We're a society that judges on beauty and but also says that it's shallow to worry about looks all the time which is what a person with Psoriasis technically does all the time. That's probably the worst of all (especially) for a woman.

A person with Psoriasis is usually constantly accused of making too much fuss over nothing (especially if it's mild). People think a skin disease is not the worst thing that could possibly happen, and they're right. What people don't undertsand, however, is that it makes it a lot more difficult for somoene to come out and share what they're feeling on a bad day. It's hard to come out and say to even a close friend that here is something that makes me feel hideous, that is unpredictable and uncomfortable and difficult to live with.

The discomfort is real. The stress is real. The insecurity is real. And the fact that the person needs a little reassurance now and then is real too.

Living with Psoriasis teaches you one thing. It teaches you to empathize with someone elses troubles even if they seem trivial, self inflicted or imaginary to you.