6/10/24
I don’t know if it’s just psychological effect from seeing in my allergy app that the tree pollen count is low, but lately it does seem that I feel better inside, like my immune system feels more normal instead of out of control. calmer.
thinking of stopping any and all allergy meds and just continue taking basic every day supplements, to see if it is indeed the drop in tree pollen count that turns my skin around. Because that would be like a…good thing to know. if it does get better, maybe if I start these allergy meds way earlier like a month before allergy season, they would work. But it seems like once my skin gets bad, I’m too far gone for any allergy meds to help me out of the midst of it.
6/12/24
to crave the taste of bitter. What does that feel like?
in the last few days, my skin seems better, but I can’t quite tell. There’s still a little itch, and it’s still looks bad, and there’s still weeping. But it seems maybe not as inflamed. I could be fooling myself, that’s how not dramatic any changes are. But i’ve stopped all allergy meds – just eating well and regular supplements and trying to sleep well but sleep schedule is still messed up (sleep from like 2 am to 7, wake for work and do anything urgent, go back to sleep until 11 or 12. I go to bed around a normal time, but skin discomfort keeps me up for hours and also sometimes wakes me up. I could try to go to bed super early at like 7 PM and then maybe I’d fall asleep at a good hour, but if I did that every night, I wouldn’t see R, or anyone at all, ever. Maybe just some nights I’ll do it.)
mentally, I feel more in charge of things than when it first got bad – like I got into a routine and have products now to care for it because I’ve had a while to adjust and procure them, so it doesn’t feel as out of control as when it first started and i wasn’t expecting it or prepared at all.
another thing helping to make me feel better mentally/physiologically is that I kind of cornered R and asked him how he felt about all that time I spent without sleep while breastfeeding – I estimated it to be about 500 nights straight i went without a full night of sleep. I realized that even though it was over (though still a relatively recent event), I was still really angry about the unfairness of it, and talking with our therapist helped me realize that I just needed some validation or acknowledgment from him regarding it. and R replied, among other things that pacified me, “I can’t imagine how hard that was for you and I wish I’d helped you more and made you feel more helped.” that was all I needed. I just needed to know his opinion about me almost working myself to death for our baby. I needed to know if he cared at all, because after the birth we were pretty blindsided by how difficult it was to care for the baby and were just trying to survive it day by day, kind of up until now (now that baby is less chaotic/we’ve adjusted), so we’d never really discussed it. And I guess he did care, through his words and also bc he’s been trying a lot harder and being more considerate since I pressed him about it.
6/14/24
tonight was pretty pivotal. When I took my socks off, after the initial few minutes, it seemed pretty certainly better: Things were flatter, there was hardly any weeping, and instead of needing to soothe two or three hours, I felt better in one hour, and the whole session didn’t hurt as much as all the past nights. I was suspecting a little that it was getting better before, but really wasn’t sure at all until tonight. i’m really relieved, but not really joyful; I’m more like exhausted and a little traumatized from the past months of dealing with it. I’m just…. relieved. if it keeps getting better, it’s a big burden off of me. My sleep will improve, I’ll be able to walk like a normal person and wear normal shoes and not feel gross and like i’m falling apart all the time, and I’ll be able to put my bare feet under blankets at night which i prefer to do when I sleep – for the past few weeks, every night I had to make sure I slept with my feet sticking out of the blanket all night because of how much weeping there was.
also, I really want to know the reason. The only thing I can think of is the pollen level change. because I stopped the allergy meds, and everything else stayed the same. i added the glutathione- maybe it was that. idk. all I know is for the past about two months, my feet were really bad and all the allergy medicine and foods and cutting sugar I tried seemed to not help at all. And the start of the whole thing coincided with the onset of tree pollen, and now that it’s getting better, it also is coinciding with the decrease of it, and from my journal, it seems like it only took about a week for two months of unchanging badness to suddenly get better. i’m even not being so strict lately with the diet, eating bites of cheese here and there, and a little more sugar (though zero refined sugar). Like if it were diet or medicine or supplements that helped me, wouldn’t it have gotten better much more gradually? also, have not used steroids at all since that one bit of time a few weeks ago that I wrote about it. So it must be an outside/environmental factor, is all I can conclude.
Marriage Journal 