Another month, another infection, another harebrained scheme to beat this disease without messing up the last 30 years of my life through topical steroids. They cause skin-thinning and possibly diabetes without even enhancing your athletic performance - unless you're an eczema athlete entering a 'not scratching' championship, in which case you'd win hands down. Ha! Hands down! Ahaha! Win a NOT SCRATCHING CHAMPIONSHIP hands dow - … ah, forget it.
I've been not scratching pretty hard myself this month, after abandoning the homeopathic trial and attempting to outbox my illness in the backroom of some filthy backstreet boozer. Which is to say, I've been using behavioural control techniques to try and nip the physical act of skin-bothering in the bud.
It hasn't been an unqualified success. I'm not suddenly Rocky Balboa, powering my way up the steps to City Hall and roaring eczema-baiting taunts at the sunrise. If there were any Eye of the Tiger moments, they involved me sitting absolutely still, clenching my fists and staring angrily at nothing. Don't. Scratch.
It's an addiction, and therefore involves a near-constant inner struggle. Two hundred times a day, I face roughly the same kind of quandary as when a chocoholic sights a Crunchie or a grog-slave glimpses a bottle of meths. I don't always win. If anyone on the streets of London ever paid a blind bit of notice to anyone else, they'd see me exhibiting the same swivel-eyed mutterings as a recovering drug user.
While many people's struggles are to do with 'keeping it together', mine involve actively splitting myself in two. It's good versus evil, the Force versus the Dark Side. Deep inside me, a wise and benevolent Yoda, clad in unstained white cotton, is being tickled by a drunk and yodelling Darth Vader, who's intent on hunting down every last itch and lightsabering the hell out of it, no matter the cost in blood.
It's hard to say just how creepy this conflict makes my inner life. I've never been in such direct opposition to myself. I've become one of history's divided soliloquists, like Hamlet, or Gollum - if Gollum believed the Ring was buried inside his own spleen and could only be retrieved by stabbing himself repeatedly with his own hands.
For example: last week I started going to bed in gloves in order to stop myself scratching at night. Odd, sad and weird as that is, what's even worse is that it didn't work. Eight hours later, I simply woke up with no gloves on. This means that, at some point during those restless twilit hours, a semiconscious brute (me) encountered the gloves, removed them, and went on torturing the victim (also me).
Even worse, the bastard (me) also took off everything else I (me) was wearing. This is something I share with other seasoned scratchers of my acquaintance. I'm a somnambulistic nudist Houdini. No matter what I go to bed in, I wake up naked, bleeding and with no recollection of what happened. David Lynch, get in touch. This would be a fantastic, suspense-filled opening to anything other than my working week.
Facing down the itch - it's like 'Nam, man. You really learn a lot about yourself. This month, I discovered that I've got an extremely powerful impulsive side, which acts opportunistically and secretly whenever I'm distracted. Perhaps that's is why I have eczema in the first place. It's certainly got a lot to do with how it managed to get so bad.
But this battle is also about greater issues of desire and self-discipline, about whether I can defer gratification and curb my natural impulses. I think it might actually be about growing up, about finding that I do have just enough self-control after all. If I can manage to harness my better judgement, the lesson can be applied all over the place.
And as a reward for trying, I get to watch my skin recover, whiten, relax, grow less dry. Corny as it sounds, I find the simple miracle of the body's healing powers actually moving to behold. The patches of red skin I thought would be there for good lighten, thicken and moisten when they aren't scratched for only two or three days. Then they get scratched again, of course, but nobody's perfect. I thought they'd be there forever; in fact, they're there because I'm putting them there - every day, when my back is turned.
As a parting shot, I think I feel confident enough to make a promise. Over the Christmas period, and in time for this column's final post next month, I'm going to attempt to affect a real and sustained improvement in the condition of my skin by not scratching. I'll post a picture in the new year, by which time I'll hopefully have achieved a passable imitation of normal skin without the prolonged use of steroids. And eaten loads of cake.
Wish me luck, and happy Christmas.
This month's verdict [as narrated by Gollum, scratching furiously]
Beware, my precious, the scritchy-scratchy man!
Get him away from us! Chop off his hands!
He's inside our arm, perhaps use a fork?
We must get him out, precious. Of course it'll work!
The scratchy man comes when we're sleeping in bed -
if he does it again then we'll chop off his head!
Here, take off his gloves and now his pyjamas.
Then hijack his column - they'll think he's bananas
