itching to find out (health)
I spent a month with my best friend in Connecticut this spring, as I do every year. She has two little girls who are the loves of my life, and husband who is the quintessential big, gruff guy who is a teddy bear inside, and a family who loves me and whom I love like my own (which is as much of a reflection on my crazy family as it is on hers!)
As soon as I got there I started getting rashes. At first there were symmetrical rashes on my forearms. Then the rash appeared on my thighs and hips at the same time as it seemed to clear up on arms. However it looked on one side of my body, in only these select places, it showed up exactly the same on the other side. Then I got a few bumps on my chest. I thought the rashes might be due to the cold, dry weather, and I thought the bumps might be some kind of bug bites. Then the bumps started to itch like crazy. Eventually I was feeling similar bumps on my side, where I couldn’t see them, and they were itching as well.
I started to get a little worried, because I know there are strange rashes that you can get as a side effect of some of the anti-HIV medications, and that they can be a sign of something fatal – and quick. In one case you have to immediately stop the medication and you can never take that medication again. In another case, you might be able to take the medication if you start at a very low dose and increase it slowly, doing a sort of de-sensitization process with your body. From what I remembered, though, these rashes occur only when you have just started one of the medications in question, and I haven’t changed any medications lately. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything I had changed recently, or at least anything that made sense as an explanation for the rashes.
For example, if I were allergic to some product my friend used in her house, why was the rash appearing in only certain areas? If something was biting me, why hadn’t it bitten anyone else in the house? Why were the rashes different? They were only getting worse and it was going to be several weeks before my next regular doctor’s appointment on the West Coast, so I decided to seek out medical help.
Our healthcare system being what it is, I had no option but to go to the emergency room. No private practice doctor would see me because I wasn’t a regular patient, and they were booked up for weeks with their own patient load anyway. If I were a regular patient they might have squeezed me in, but such was not the case. I was halfway between New Haven and Providence, Rhode Island, but the Yale University urgent care clinic wouldn’t see me either without a referral from a primary care physician; figure that one out! I had to go to the emergency room in Providence.
The doctor there diagnosed dry skin/weather associated rash, plus shingles/folliculitis. I have never heard of shingles not hurting before; in fact, I thought it was always very painful. She told me that sometimes it is not. And she seemed to think that folliculitis made sense, but I wasn’t convinced. She gave me a strong, broad-spectrum anti-biotic in addition to an anti-viral drug. I bought some heavy-duty moisturizing creams and took the medications. Very, very slowly it all cleared up, but I continued to have itchy spots all over my body despite taking lots of Benadryl every night for weeks because of sinus congestion. It’s as if some little bug is biting me in various spots all over my body – sometimes there is a little red bump but just as often there is not. And that has been going on all the way up through today, three months later.
My primary care doctor, my dermatologist, and my hepatologist on the West Coast concurred with the diagnoses from Providence – even though itching can be a sign of serious liver problems. My primary care doctor in Brazil concurs as well. I guess this is just another one of those medical mysteries that comes with having an HIV-infected body, never to be solved, and probably to resolve itself without any intervention. Sigh.
