Eczema

I spent years trying for years to get my skin under control. Most people under-estimate what eczema really is, but for a lot of people who struggle with it, it feels almost shameful. I’ve had doctors diagnose me with scabies, lice, bed-bugs, fungal infections, STIs… people who saw the rash would assume I was dirty and gross. People are so stubborn that in their eyes, nothing that severe could be eczema. Even when they know, for a fact, that some cases of eczema can be pretty damn severe.

People think of it as a child’s disease, and they ignore the possibility that it could happen to anyone. It’s a sudden, and inexplicable, betrayal committed by your own body. I remember the day I was there playing Skyrim when, all of a sudden, my hand started to itch. I scratched it, not even thinking, and (here’s the important part) the itch never went away.

I need you to stop and think, carefully, now. Because that was 9 years ago. Until very recently, it never went away.

Eight years. Eight long agonising years where that itch spread and never ever stopped. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine having an itch, a burning writhing wriggling itchy itch on the back of your hand that doesn’t go away, no matter what you do? Scratching it only makes it worse and over time it starts to hurt, then crack, then bleed, then get infected and grow blisters and pustules and it hurts so bad but the entire time the itching never ever stops.

For eight years.

For eight years I had to wear short-sleeved shirts because the pus that dripped down from my hands discoloured any sleeves I wore. I tried every cream, every emollient, every steroid, every treatment you can think of and it still didn’t stop. But nothing I said would make the doctors take it seriously. Half the time I’d go to the surgery I wouldn’t even see the same GP so I’d have to re-explain my problem all over again and then they’d inevitably start suggesting things I’d already tried like treating me for ringworm, taking gluten out of my diet, or using perfume free soap.

Did they think I didn’t want to be cured? I tried. I tried it all. I would’ve killed for it to be ringworm or scabies, even if that was gross. What’s a little embarrassment in the scale of things? It’s nothing. I would have given anything to know the source of the problem, to know what had robbed me of sleep for years, what dried my skin out so badly that it cracked whenever I made a fist and sent blood trickling into my pocket… to know what robbed me of my confidence, of my identity, and my sanity for nearly an entire decade.

I gave up seeking medical help in the end. I couldn’t bear it, hearing the same old crap over and over. I knew it wasn’t anyone else’s fault that it had happened to me but that didn’t stop the bitterness. I learned some harsh lessons during the early years. For one, most people don’t really care about you. Most friends just want you to pretend that you’re okay, but when you’re not? God, all they want you to do is to shut up.

“Oh that’s awful,” they’d say the first time, like they were reading from a script. And then they’d repeat it the second time they see me. And then the third they’d change the topic. And then the fourth? The fifth?

Sooner or later they’d snap and make it clear. One friend even said it as much:

“Jesus Christ!” They shouted. “You’re bumming me out man! How fucking annoying can one person be?”

How annoying can I be? That was my closest friend saying that, and just a few years into the whole thing. Even back then I knew I shouldn’t be angry. They were just being honest. But afterwards I pretty quickly gave up on the whole idea of friendship, isolating myself and living off a meagre allowance from my father along with whatever freelance work I could get. I’d only go out at dark, if I went out at all. And I’d have to throw myself at my work just to find a little peace, relying on a transitory obsession to block out the itch out for just long enough to stay sane. But then once I’d sit up and do anything else, breaking the work-based trance, the itch would come straight back.

I remember thinking that I’d give anything to be myself again. I missed myself more than any friend or colleague. I missed being me. I tried everything to go back to my normal self, giving up all integrity and dignity. I even tried alternative medicine: acupuncture, reflexology, crystal healing. Christ, I even used snail-slime creams and semen-based emollients. At one point I actually got on my knees and prayed, recalling the Our Father and Hail Mary from school. When that didn’t work, I tried praying to Satan, then I pulled a list off Wikipedia and started reeling prayers off to every name on there. I just wanted some help, but the only answer I ever got came from inside my own head.

It was late and I was lying in bed, crying with frustration and gently rubbing the red raw bleeding skin on my infected hands. It hurt to touch them, but that stimulation helped overcome the itch. Like every night, my mind was in tatters; just an array of intrusive thoughts with no end or beginning—a kind of bubbling maelstrom of self-hate and nonsense—when suddenly I just started to beg for it to stop. I didn’t beg God, or the stars, or Buddha, or Jesus, or anyone else. It was silent, dead silent: it was just me, the moonlight, and the shadows. And I prayed to what was there, in that room with me.

I prayed to the darkness, the shadows, and the silence.

For a moment I thought I heard a scratchy whisper. It grew louder and louder until it sounded like a thousand voices… a horde of buzzing rasping insects speaking back to me in a million whispers, all just one big cacophony of mindless gibberish and I fell into that sound and it was like floating in water, or bathing in white noise. I couldn’t understand what they said but I felt it. I felt something looking at me and for the first time in my entire life I had a spiritual experience.

Can you imagine a staunch atheist like myself thinking, for just a second, they’d seen the face of God? I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was happy. I genuinely thought I’d come face-to-face with proof of something more than the mundane and I swore I’d give it anything and everything. I felt so small beneath its gaze I forgot all about the itch. This, I thought, was a glimpse into something strange and true and powerful beyond measure and I felt so humbled and I finally admitted just how scared I was of dying and how fed up I was of life. All those years spent pretending that I wasn’t bothered by the idea of my own mortality, that I was better than people who dreamt of heaven... it all came crashing down around me as I finally felt like I could see something beyond life, and beyond death.

I was like a child, weeping desperately and screaming about how wrong I was to ever doubt. “Take the suffering away,” I cried. “Please.”

And then I woke up. I lay there for a moment both confused and heartbroken. I was dazed, reeling from an intense feeling of loss and trying to get my head around the strange sound that was all around me. It was the whisper from my dream, deafening and angry, and it had followed me. That’s when I looked down and saw that I was dragging my nails along the back of my hand without even realising it. That scratching sound wasn’t the whispering of a god, it was my stubby little chewed nails being driven into my skin and dragged along. They left behind broken flesh that was yellow and pink in hue and which, under the pressure of my fingers, oozed thousands of droplets of pus and blood from a million little micro-fissures. It looked a little bit like a honey-filled sponge being squeezed of all its contents.

After that night I spiralled into despair. For me to have faltered on my ideals for even just that brief moment left me feeling wretched and weak. I always hated religion and I thought so little of people who turned to it in hardship, but when things got tough I turned out to be no different. It felt like that tiny last vestige of my belief in the world had gone out the window with my own principles. The truth was, I didn’t actually hate religion, but I hated myself. And the way I’d begged so pathetically for help just helped strengthen my own self-loathing.

After that I started telling myself that no one, not even any spooky spirits, were going to help me. I started asking just what I’d be willing to give to be free of the itch.

Disfigurement?

Pain?

Loss?

Amputation?

And I realised, none of those things bothered me that much. I started exploring new ways to override any sensation in my hands. Freezing worked very well but it was impermanent. It numbed everything but that wasn’t quite good enough either, because it was actually the pain of thawing and freezing that really satisfied the itch. I tried fire instead and found that a lighter held under the back of my hand hurt so good. It was like a purge of the nerve endings that just pushed everything else out. There was nothing but white-hot light that seared the itch into brittle black carbon.

Pain started to feel so good, but only certain types of pain.

Things like cuts, or scratches, didn’t work. It needed surface area. I tried dipping my hands in lighter fluid and lighting them, but it was too transient. It just went “whoosh” and was gone a second or two later. If I held my hands in an actual fire, I found that my flesh would start to cook and that was a deep agony I couldn’t stand up against. Flaying worked, a little, but by this point my skin had grown into thick callouses, my fingers becoming thick sausages I could barely bend. I tried using a knife, but it blunted very quickly and at one point I slipped and it caught on the bone. It was a horrible feeling, although for some reason, in the moment, I found it very funny.

No, it was about surface area. I was at war with my skin. So I tried sandpaper. It felt a little bit like cheating because at first, it felt like I was scratching the itch, like I was giving into the very irritant I was trying to beat. But a quick upgrade to a belt-sander changed that. Again, I had to push hard to get past the scaly surface layers—black and red like coal-fire—but it was worth it. As soon as I started to bleed I knew I’d hit the good stuff. It was something special. When I was a kid I drove a quad bike once and I remember the feeling or raw power and freedom as I let go of my inhibition and roared that engine across the countryside.

It was like that. Just this Vrrrm Vrrrrm of the sander as I set it to full and forced my hands down onto it, blasting away chunks of necrotic, hardened skin until I found the soft spot below that screamed in agony. Ohhh it felt good. It was a giant fuck you to the disease that had plagued me for years.

But the belt sander broke, and soon enough my skin grew back even thicker until I had to chip inches of it away just to reach a single nerve. Even worse, the fingers had become so thick and unwieldly that I couldn’t even hold a knife. But I didn’t give up there; I had one last idea.

When I lowered my hands into the boiling water, I thought I’d really gone over the edge. But what shocked me was just how good it felt. It was agony but almost unrecognisable. I didn’t want to pull away from the tidal wave of pain. It felt so good. It was the relief of the fire combined with the roaring power of the belt-sander. Even as my skin sloughed off into the pan and splashed my face with burning water, I felt charged with this sense of power and conviction. It was like... well, it was like having my very first orgasm all over again. I even got an erection that thumbed mindlessly against the stove’s dials as I stood there laughing hysterically at the pan that boiled over.

Something happened at that point, because when I lifted my hands up they looked like melted candle wax. For a second I stared at them with a disordered and broken mind, no real emotion winning over. But then, more of the skin started to drip off, landing on the kitchen floor with sizzling pops. One of those drips landed on my shoe and started chewing through the leather. I managed to kick it off before it touched my foot but when I checked later, I saw that it had destroyed almost the whole shoe.

But the skin kept sloppily falling off, leaving piles of slippery slug-like dead skin as I walked in circles, dumbfounded at the sight. The hissing noise was tremendous, the sound of bubbling boiling flesh sounding almost as if it was coming from within my own ears. I would have wondered about how it could be so loud when I realised suddenly, for the first time in nearly a decade, that I didn’t feel any itchiness.

That’s when I saw something remarkable, miraculous even. Beneath the rotten slush that was sliding down my arms and onto the floor, I saw fresh skin. Just as quickly as it had all started, the process was over; the last of the dead skin slumped away and I was left staring at new hands. They were unblemished, unaffected, and completely itch-free!

I was so over-come with emotion, I collapsed. I honest-to-God passed out and woke up on my sofa a full thirty-five hours later. I sat up immediately and stared at my hands in disbelief, trying to convince myself that I hadn’t been dreaming. But no, I confirmed as I ran my fingers over one another, these were my hands, and they felt perfectly normal, not even a bump or a mild rash! Looking around I saw the bloodied tools I worked with and it was as if, for the first time in years I saw how I’d been living. It was disgusting and the sight of my squalid home made me feel ashamed. If it hadn’t been for the pile of grotesque rotting flesh I’d swept into one corner—possibly doing so in a fugue state before passing out—I could have been tempted to think it was all a crazy dream, or that I’d never had eczema and had actually gone a bit mad.

But it was there, sitting in the corner of my kitchen, about knee-high and smelling to high heaven. The pan I’d used was nothing but a melted mess of plastic and metal, and the stove below was in utter ruin. Looking around I started thinking about what life would be like for me moving forward, and I suddenly realised that I never wanted to spend another second in that shithole apartment. It was like I was seeing it through fresh eyes: the dingy smelly bed sheets I hadn’t washed in years, the sofa I’d sat on so often that I’d worn a hole through the fabric, and the coffee table covered in unwashed plates and rotten food. Even the walls looked yellow like a smoker’s fingertips and made me feel disgusting.

I decided to leave. I threw on the least filthy clothes I could find and phoned my father. He sounded surprised at my tone of voice, but happily paid for me to get a ride home after I told him I was coming back. Suddenly it was like I’d come out of a nightmare. I stopped on the way home to grab some clean clothes from a shop and left that place behind with a sense of shame and relief. The whole train ride back I couldn’t stop touching the smooth unblemished skin on my hands. I could have cried with joy. I revelled in the sense of newfound happiness, although I felt a strange, lingering, sort of anxiety.

Just before I’d left, I approached the pile of rotting skin. Covering my nose, I grabbed a nearby broom and poked the handle into it. A strange sense came over me, and I leaned down, resting my palms on my knees and turning my head so that one ear was close to the pile. I couldn’t say if it was just blood in my ears, or the silence in the flat, but I swore I heard a strange whispering, or buzzing coming from the flesh.

Something about that noise filled me with anxiety as I rode the train back home. I couldn’t stop thinking of that apartment sitting there like a ruined monument to my depression and misery. The thought of that empty, filthy, dark abode and that putrid pile of flesh sitting in total darkness sent shivers up my spine. It was like every dark hole I ever saw as a kid, every unexplained shadow, every haunting silence… That grey, dull, empty below-ground apartment became, to me, somehow worse than the scariest haunted house or the deepest darkest ruin.

Sometimes, even now, I dream of it. I dream of dust motes floating through moonlit rays, of gathering dust, and I think of that pile of skin sitting in the corner glowing hot red as a rising wave of angry whispers bubble out of its centre.

Thankfully, when I stepped off the train and returned home, that terror left me for long enough to start getting myself back on my feet. My father gave me a job in my hometown and I started exercising, eating healthily, and I even reunited with some old friends from school. It was nice. It was like a sort of homecoming where I got be the old me, or rather the new me. The me I was always meant to be, who I’d always been long before the eczema had started.

But a few weeks ago, I got a cheque. It sounds stupid, I know. It doesn’t a make a damn bit of sense, but I stopped my freelance work the second I got home. I changed industries and I stopped bothering with any of that. And, to my total shame, I disregarded my old flat. I kept expecting real life to badger me into dealing with it, but nothing happened. My landlord never came after me for missed rent and I kind of just hoped he thought I’d gone mental and run away. I so badly wanted that problem to be someone else’s… it was so embarrassing to think of all that filth I’d left behind. The thought of having to own up to it, to go there and actively clean it, just filled me with shame that I didn’t want to deal with now that things were looking so good.

But I got a cheque for freelance work and I don’t know how. It even came with a note saying “loved the work on the website, thank you so much” and when I looked, sure enough there was a website that, apparently, I had made. So I decided to log back into my old accounts and, worryingly, they were still active. My first reaction was to think of fraud, or identity theft, but as I read the exchanges between myself and various others I noticed the unmistakable signs of my own writing. The words I used, the way I signed off, even the style of my work was all a perfect match.

Any anxiety or shame was now gone, replaced with confusion. So I phoned my landlord and started to apologise only for him to interrupt me:

“I got the latest payment yesterday, you must be confused,” he told me.

Latest payment? I wondered. I hadn’t paid rent in nearly a year, not since I’d fled all my troubles and left them behind.

I asked my father if I could borrow his car and he let me. I drove straight back to the city I’d lived in, anxiety troubling me as I navigated those rain-soaked streets. I remembered those roads and it worried me, because it was a reminder that I was still the same person. On some level I was terrified that if I kept going, I’d lose all progress, that I’d just get back and walk in and my belly would go pop and flop over my jeans and my skin would turn greasy and I’d forget about the last few months and sit back on my sofa and start smoking and before I know it I’d be rubbing my hands trying to avoid the itch…

I had to constantly remind myself of who I was, even as I parked on a nearby street and walked through the torrential downpour. But it wasn’t enough. I stopped in the ragged garden the landlord never bothered to tend and stared at the basement window that led into my old flat. It made me feel ill just to see it, I couldn’t bear it. And I would have turned and walked away were it not the strange sight of a hunched over figure sat on the sofa.

Was this a squatter? I asked, even as I approached the window and leaned down. It looked like someone wearing a ghillie suit. It was hard to see with the rain, but I managed to glimpse piles of trash and the glow of an old laptop that I’d left behind. But other than that, the apartment was in total darkness, and that’s when the figure suddenly jerked and looked in my direction.

I fell backwards and watched in terror as the person stood up and approached me. That’s when I realised they weren’t wearing a ghillie suit. It was pink, and yellow, and putrescent green, and there was no face at all. It shuffled towards me and somehow, over the sound of the rain, there came this terrible white noise, like I was standing under a jet engine. It was deafening, painful just to experience. But it didn’t stop. The noise only grew louder as this shape came closer and closer and before I knew it they were pressed up against the glass of the basement window.

They slammed their hand against the glass and left a repulsive trail of yellow bile, their head thrown back in spasms that I would later realise was laughter. Up close I could see the shifting chunks of molten skin grinding against itself, writhing and moving like the hide of a horse twitching to throw off flies. Black and red and green and yellow all intermingled in a chaotic mess of fresh blisters and rotting meat. The sight made me gag and I watched even as this shape lifted its hand and furiously scratched away at its face.

And that noise. Jesus Christ that noise…

I got up and ran away, stopping only to throw up just outside my car. I managed to start the engine and drive a little while but apparently I must have passed out at the wheel, because I woke up some time in my car on the side of the road with a concerned looking officer tapping on the window. I told them I was very ill and asked them to call my father, which they did, and before I knew it, I was being taken back home by my family after some paramedics had checked my vitals.

I’ve had to put the whole experience down to some kind of temporary madness. It’s all I can do to keep living my life. I’m happy to say I have a girlfriend now and my new line of work has opened up some great job opportunities outdoors. Being away from the city is reinvigorating and exactly what my mental health needed, and my family (while we have our differences) remain the most supportive and special people I’ve ever known. Most days I don’t even think about my life in that city and when people probe me about those years I just explain it in terms of ailing mental health. But sometimes I worry that’s not true, that everything I saw and felt and thought was 100% real.

And sometimes, I log back into my old accounts, and worry at the way new jobs get accepted, and new work gets done. And whenever a cheque should make its way to me, I secretly go the post office and post it to my old address hoping that if anything really is down there, it never has a reason to try and leave.