This piece is kind of a slight departure from ‘regular’ Dose of Wonder articles, but at the same time, not really. Because I’m all about trying to find the wonder in the ordinary. Even though sometimes it can seem difficult and almost impossible, like what I’m writing about today.
Do you ever build a spreadsheet for your own body? (I guess when you hit a certain phase of life, maybe it’s something we should start doing? I jest. Sort of.)
Not a metaphorical one. An actual one. Itch severity, zero to ten. Trend versus yesterday. Notes field. I built this on day one of a prescription, at the start of a vacation, because I wanted somewhere to put all the data my body was suddenly generating, and my brain had officially run out of room to hold it.
I had Claude build a symptom tracker for me a few days ago for me to keep a log of what I’m experiencing, so I can put it all together for my Doctor when I see him in person on August 21st (which feels so, so far away right now!).
Here’s the inventory of my body going on strike right now and deciding to throw various things at me at once, if you’re curious (and if you’re not, that’s fair, you can just stop reading if this isn’t your thing):
A bumpy red itchy rash under/next to one breast. A bit of my skin in that area is having a small rebellion.
Under one arm, a rash that’s made a home above my armpit on my upper inner arm, which I thought were initially bumps but I think now are just flat, annoyed skin in the shape of bumps, which is somehow harder to explain to a doctor in an email! (and now a similar rash is slowly appearing on the other under arm!)
A bug bite that a well-meaning baking soda/tea tree oil ‘instect bite gel’ turned into an actual warzone of bright red raised/textured skin with tiny little blistery bumps all over it because the bite was all like FTS!
And underneath all of it, months of a symptom I won’t dress up in a euphemism: vulvar itching, disruptive enough that it was waking me up at night, which is a new and unwelcome upgrade from “just annoying in the daytime.” But that’s actually the least of my problems now since the ointment seems to be helping.
I have, at time of writing, applied Vaseline (and aloe gel) to nearly every part of my body except the one that is more embarrassing to talk about. That one gets its own prescription ointment.
A couple days ago I gave a .5% hydrocortisone cream a try on my underarm rash and my under/next to breast irritation to see if that calms things down there. So far so good for the breast issue, not so much on the underarm, so I went to a pharmacy here in the US today (August 13th) while on vacation to ask what I should do with the under arm rash and they suggested some athlete’s foot cream which apparently helps heat rash (if it is indeed a heat related!).
And at one point this week, deep in the fog of managing four separate irritated body parts at once, I texted my husband a question about wanting to get unscented deodorant in the wrong chat platform and he was confused, because right now I’m acting like a woman trying to be in charge of a small, personal air traffic control failure.
Here’s the moment it clicked for me, somewhere around day five of tracking all this: I wasn’t dealing with one problem. I was dealing with a body that had started talking in several places at once, and I’d been treating each voice like its own separate emergency, instead of noticing they’d all shown up in the same season.
My family doctor mentioned that my issue ‘down there’, after prescribing me some specific medication for that issue to try in the meantime while on vacation (did I mention I’m experiencing all this body freak out stuff while on vacation?) might eventually need topical estrogen. Because of course. Insert eye roll emoji. My walk-in doctor, back in the spring, used the phrase “genitourinary syndrome of menopause,” which is a mouthful I now know how to say, and that before that had never even heard of and I know all about most of the symptoms, which is its own strange milestone, I guess. And somewhere in the middle of Googling rashes at midnight, I asked the obvious question out loud for the first time: is this all just... perimenopause?
I don’t actually know yet. Neither does my doctor — that’s what the appointment next week is for. And a potential referral to a gynecologist. And the funny thing is, since I’m on vacation, my doctor actually has no idea about all these other body issues I’m currently afflicted with! (underarm, under breast, bug bite whatever-it-is). All these other separate (but maybe related?) skin freak-outs. I’m thinking my body is staging a walk out. It’s on high alert. Extra hyper-vigiliant. I keep thinking this is happening because my body is experiencing the ‘down there’ stuff, and then the underarm and breast irritation, and now it’s like: OH, we are ON now! And now it’s started to be itchy all over. Like the rest of my body has gone: I don’t want to be left out of this party! (Edit: my doctor now does know because I sent him an email update on the prescription ointment and how it’s working for my original issue, and also let him know of these new rashes that have appeared on my underarms (I didn’t even tell him about the bug bite thing because that’s healing well (slowly, but it’s healing).
And I think that not-knowing is the most authentic (yet most frustrating!) place to be, rather than tying a bow on it and declaring my body a wise and knowing oracle that was Trying To Tell Me Something All Along. Sometimes a body doing five confusing things at once isn’t a message. It’s just a body, mid-transition (to what, I have to wonder?), without a map, and making noise in the only language it has. It’s blaring all the alarms.
But I keep coming back to this: I have never in my life paid this much attention to my own skin. Never tracked it, photographed it, timed it, compared it night to night like a very small, very itchy research project. And there’s something in that — not a lesson, I promise, I’m not about to tell you a rash is some sort of gift — but something that feels like finally looking. Like a body that’s been changing for a while got loud enough, all at once, that I actually had to stop and pay attention to it instead of just moving through it.
Here’s the thing about a body on strike, though: even a walkout needs a witness. Someone has to stand there with a clipboard, watching, taking it all down. Turns out that’s been me. Not because I signed up for the job (I really wish I hadn’t been given this job! It’s not a fun role to have). Because for maybe the first time in my whole life, I was actually looking — at the exact shade of red under my arm, at how the itch and bumpiness on my breast changes between morning and night, at the small good moment when a patch of skin that had been furious for days finally calmed down and doesn’t feel as much like an alien planet (my dry/scaly/rough arm patch thing near my elbow doesn’t look as much like the surface of Mars anymore!).
And that’s something I need to remind myself. That this is a body I’ve spent years walking around in instead of living in, finally getting looked at like it matters.
I still don’t have a tidy ending for you, and the union hasn’t settled, it’s still on the picket line. But if you’re also lying awake this summer, cataloguing something you can’t quite explain at brunch — I don’t think you’re broken, and I don’t think you’re overreacting. I think you might just be, for once, paying attention. And that’s its own strange, unexpected gift, even wrapped in hydrocortisone (and other ointments and creams and gels) and a doctor’s appointment you keep counting down to.
But I do have to say, I’m counting down the days til I get home from vacation and have my family doctor appointment on the 21st.
Stay soft. Stay curious. Stay human.
Caitlin
(P.S. my family doctor is so awesome! He’s replied to two emails I’ve sent about these issues — the first when I was going to see him initially before my vacation, when I emailed just to give him a run down of what I’ve been dealing with since Mid-May before my appointment and he then just prescribed me some ointment to use while on vacation, so I didn’t have to see him in person until after I got back, and the second email I sent today (August 13th) explaining about these new irritations/rashes, and he emailed back at 8:30pm tonight giving me some advice on how I should try to treat it until I see him next Friday! That’s great patient care in my books.)
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