Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Back To Basics
More about why I call this blog "Crimson Autograph".
There's the political side of course. I'll no doubt post plenty of political stuff, and in today's world a lot of that is going to be about not understanding a need for violence and confrontation. I think "(Hey Lord) Don't Ask Me Questions" admirably covers what I feel at present. However that's not the only reason I picked it.
I also leave a crimsom autograph just about everywhere I set foot at times. I bleed. Literally.
Not all the time, it's something that comes and goes, generally for a few weeks every few years. Though at present it's been eighteen nearly solid months.
I have atopic eczema. At times that means my skin gets a bit dry. At times it means my skin flakes off in layers leaving me raw in places. At worst it bleeds even if I manage not to scratch at it. It bleeds on clothes and it bleeds on sheets, it bleeds on pretty much anything I touch. For a while.
That isn't the problem with eczema though. The worst symptoms generally go away in a week or two with the right treatment. It's not all that painful, and generally it isn't life threatening except in that it means ones immune system is otherwise occupied when then gugs come to call. The problem with eczema is what it does to your head.
Think about this. What separates you from the rest of the world? What is the boundary between yourself and everything else? What makes YOU separate from your surroundings? Your skin. Now try and imagine not only not trusting your skin to be there when you need it, but knowing that your own body is attacking your skin all the time. That's the problem with eczema. Throw in the fact that most of us who have it have a self image with the condition at its worst. We KNOW we look horrific all the time, even if we've just looked in the mirror and seen that we don't. And we don't have anything that we can trust between us and the outside world.
This year I've been in and out of Robert Willan Ward in St Thomas' Hospital. It's had a huge impact on me psychologically, since it meant spending my time with a group of twenty four people all pretty much in the same boat. I've gained some confidence in the fact that even wrapped up in bandages from head to toe, a human being is still a human being. I'm still me, and it's OK if the outside world can break in a bit now and again, and it's OK if I leave a bit of myself here and there.
You have to make your own fun in hospital. In the morning the psoriasis patients would get a treatment that involved various medicinal goos under a layer of bandages. By four o clock these would have soaked through to make a rather impresssive purple-brown staining on the bandages. So that's the time of day we'd take a mass expecition to have coffee and cakes in the posh tea room in the hospital lobby. "Hi! We all have skin diseases and we've come to have tea with you."
Anyway, I've started learning about how eczema has made me the person I am. So that's the other reason for the blog title, because part of the purpose of this blog is for me to find out who I am and why.
There's the political side of course. I'll no doubt post plenty of political stuff, and in today's world a lot of that is going to be about not understanding a need for violence and confrontation. I think "(Hey Lord) Don't Ask Me Questions" admirably covers what I feel at present. However that's not the only reason I picked it.
I also leave a crimsom autograph just about everywhere I set foot at times. I bleed. Literally.
Not all the time, it's something that comes and goes, generally for a few weeks every few years. Though at present it's been eighteen nearly solid months.
I have atopic eczema. At times that means my skin gets a bit dry. At times it means my skin flakes off in layers leaving me raw in places. At worst it bleeds even if I manage not to scratch at it. It bleeds on clothes and it bleeds on sheets, it bleeds on pretty much anything I touch. For a while.
That isn't the problem with eczema though. The worst symptoms generally go away in a week or two with the right treatment. It's not all that painful, and generally it isn't life threatening except in that it means ones immune system is otherwise occupied when then gugs come to call. The problem with eczema is what it does to your head.
Think about this. What separates you from the rest of the world? What is the boundary between yourself and everything else? What makes YOU separate from your surroundings? Your skin. Now try and imagine not only not trusting your skin to be there when you need it, but knowing that your own body is attacking your skin all the time. That's the problem with eczema. Throw in the fact that most of us who have it have a self image with the condition at its worst. We KNOW we look horrific all the time, even if we've just looked in the mirror and seen that we don't. And we don't have anything that we can trust between us and the outside world.
This year I've been in and out of Robert Willan Ward in St Thomas' Hospital. It's had a huge impact on me psychologically, since it meant spending my time with a group of twenty four people all pretty much in the same boat. I've gained some confidence in the fact that even wrapped up in bandages from head to toe, a human being is still a human being. I'm still me, and it's OK if the outside world can break in a bit now and again, and it's OK if I leave a bit of myself here and there.
You have to make your own fun in hospital. In the morning the psoriasis patients would get a treatment that involved various medicinal goos under a layer of bandages. By four o clock these would have soaked through to make a rather impresssive purple-brown staining on the bandages. So that's the time of day we'd take a mass expecition to have coffee and cakes in the posh tea room in the hospital lobby. "Hi! We all have skin diseases and we've come to have tea with you."
Anyway, I've started learning about how eczema has made me the person I am. So that's the other reason for the blog title, because part of the purpose of this blog is for me to find out who I am and why.
# posted by Eric @ 11:29 AM 
