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Back On The Pretty Pills
Sep. 21st, 2009 03:50 amI have horrible, horrible rosacea. (Not me, and not safe for lunch.) It's really bad, and part of the reason why I don't like being photographed. When I don't take my face medicine for a while, I start looking like Manuel Noriega got drunk and punched a bee hive. It hurts, too. I hate it. I recognize that no one is 100% with their bodies, but Jesus, honestly. Toss me a fuckin' bone here.
A bunch of us are vacationing together next month, renting a cabin in Tahoe where, I hope, we will all act out our deepest Love! Valor! Compassion! fantasies. (I want the John Jeckyll part, but Richard always snatches it away from me. He's a natural.) So because people will bring cameras, I have started chugging my Pretty Pills again. Tetracycline. 1000mg before breakfast, 1000 mg before bed, and yes, I hate them too. I hate them because they grind me up with severe, bowel-wringing nausea, but holy cow do they work wonders on my face. So I take them. Sometimes.
I've had rosacea since my late teens, which is rare. Usually it starts after you turn 30. I started with your standard-issue adolescent outbreaks. Nothing special. By high school the face situation had gone completely berserk, and mom, being distrustful of doctors and medicine in general, wouldn't take me to see anyone. Not that I thought anything was medically wrong. I just figured that a doctor might be able to prescribe me something helpful. Like maybe foster care. In the meantime, mere soap and water were clearly insufficient to the task, and so I stepped up the program by scrubbing with alcohol and various household surfactants. Turns out that Lysol is really bad for rosacea, in a skin-dissolving, capillary-exposing, face-on-fire kind of way. Such bathroom adventures! I learned that I'm a mezzo-soprano when I scream.
For the most part, growing up, my face-scrubbing day started with a forty-five minute shower, minimum. I couldn't help it then, and I can't help it today. I love showers. Showering is the closest thing I have to a religion. You can't take a man's religion from him. It's unconstitutional.
My family mocked my obsessive showering habits mercilessly, which was normal and expected. "Mock" is pretty much our default setting. "Nag" is big with us too.
"God, you took long enough in there. How clean do you have to be? You're so stupid."
After school I'd come home, head to the bathroom, scrub my face, and deploy Operation: Harvest. Full-scale search and destroy. My family had a weird no-closed-doors policy when I was growing up, so anyone could walk into the bathroom at any time.
Random Family Member: Stop picking at your face.
Me: I hate looking like this.
Random Family Member: You're scarring your face, stupid.
Me: I'll take scars over this pus constellation.
Random Family Member: Well, you wouldn't have zits if you washed your face once in a while.
Did you see that? See how they got to have it both ways? God, that ruled.
In the intervening years, I talked to a lot of doctors about the problem. They all told me the same things. Quit drinking, you lush. Quit eating spicy food, you fatty. Quit smoking, you smoker. All of those things do exacerbate rosacea, so I quit them. Still, the face problems, and still, it was always something I was doing wrong. Eventually I ran out of things to quit, so I finally saw an actual dermatologist, which I should have demanded when I was eighteen.
It took the dermatologist less than ten seconds to figure it out. She walked into the examination room saying, "Hi, Matthew, I'm Dr.— oh! You have rosacea. That must hurt like hell. Here's your prescription. We'll see you in a month." And that was it. I'll probably be on tetracycline for the rest of my life, or at least for as long as I don't care to look like Emperor Pustulon.
The best part of all this? It turns out that rosacea is hereditary. So it's one more thing that I can blame on my goddamn family, which is all I really care about, honestly. Why else would I have a journal?
A bunch of us are vacationing together next month, renting a cabin in Tahoe where, I hope, we will all act out our deepest Love! Valor! Compassion! fantasies. (I want the John Jeckyll part, but Richard always snatches it away from me. He's a natural.) So because people will bring cameras, I have started chugging my Pretty Pills again. Tetracycline. 1000mg before breakfast, 1000 mg before bed, and yes, I hate them too. I hate them because they grind me up with severe, bowel-wringing nausea, but holy cow do they work wonders on my face. So I take them. Sometimes.
I've had rosacea since my late teens, which is rare. Usually it starts after you turn 30. I started with your standard-issue adolescent outbreaks. Nothing special. By high school the face situation had gone completely berserk, and mom, being distrustful of doctors and medicine in general, wouldn't take me to see anyone. Not that I thought anything was medically wrong. I just figured that a doctor might be able to prescribe me something helpful. Like maybe foster care. In the meantime, mere soap and water were clearly insufficient to the task, and so I stepped up the program by scrubbing with alcohol and various household surfactants. Turns out that Lysol is really bad for rosacea, in a skin-dissolving, capillary-exposing, face-on-fire kind of way. Such bathroom adventures! I learned that I'm a mezzo-soprano when I scream.
For the most part, growing up, my face-scrubbing day started with a forty-five minute shower, minimum. I couldn't help it then, and I can't help it today. I love showers. Showering is the closest thing I have to a religion. You can't take a man's religion from him. It's unconstitutional.
My family mocked my obsessive showering habits mercilessly, which was normal and expected. "Mock" is pretty much our default setting. "Nag" is big with us too.
"God, you took long enough in there. How clean do you have to be? You're so stupid."
After school I'd come home, head to the bathroom, scrub my face, and deploy Operation: Harvest. Full-scale search and destroy. My family had a weird no-closed-doors policy when I was growing up, so anyone could walk into the bathroom at any time.
Random Family Member: Stop picking at your face.
Me: I hate looking like this.
Random Family Member: You're scarring your face, stupid.
Me: I'll take scars over this pus constellation.
Random Family Member: Well, you wouldn't have zits if you washed your face once in a while.
Did you see that? See how they got to have it both ways? God, that ruled.
In the intervening years, I talked to a lot of doctors about the problem. They all told me the same things. Quit drinking, you lush. Quit eating spicy food, you fatty. Quit smoking, you smoker. All of those things do exacerbate rosacea, so I quit them. Still, the face problems, and still, it was always something I was doing wrong. Eventually I ran out of things to quit, so I finally saw an actual dermatologist, which I should have demanded when I was eighteen.
It took the dermatologist less than ten seconds to figure it out. She walked into the examination room saying, "Hi, Matthew, I'm Dr.— oh! You have rosacea. That must hurt like hell. Here's your prescription. We'll see you in a month." And that was it. I'll probably be on tetracycline for the rest of my life, or at least for as long as I don't care to look like Emperor Pustulon.
The best part of all this? It turns out that rosacea is hereditary. So it's one more thing that I can blame on my goddamn family, which is all I really care about, honestly. Why else would I have a journal?
