And then there’s one steroid cream for your normal skin and then there’s kind of a weak steroid slash D- D3 cream so that’s vitamin D for your face. It’s the kind of more sensitive parts of your skin, your ears, your armpits, I don’t know if you’ve got it on your groin, so anywhere more sensitive that you don’t want to be putting strong steroids on. And yeah, I think that’s about it. And I know if my psoriasis doesn’t get any better they would like send me to see a dermatologist but then the creams I think from then on are quite harsh, and for my age they don’t want to put me on such strong creams.

I do worry about the day, and I do anticipate the day when nothing’s going to be able to help me. I don’t see, I follow kind of news of progress on psoriasis and stuff like that, and I don’t see us progressing anywhere from the treatments that we use now and treatments that we used twenty years ago. And so you see that other conditions are like moving really fast in terms of what, cos they’re prioritised or something like that. And, and this is something that’s really important to me. And I don’t feel like certain skin conditions are prioritised in terms of research or investment.

And I do track that sort of thing. And I’m worried that what I’ve used is, is not going to work on me soon, because things have stopped working on me in the past. And, or they’re not as, this, this ointment that I use, it used to, I remember when I used to put it on, it would literally, I would see an improvement by the end of the day. Like it was so good when I first got it. It was amazing. Now it takes like, if I was to put it on say today, it would take maybe like four days for the effects to kind of kick in. Which is still not too bad.

I’ve had creams in the past that are like runny so when you put them on you have to give them time to dry of which when if you’re in the morning before you go to school or before you go to work if you’re a bit older you don’t really have time to just put things on for take like 10 minutes to put things on and then 15 minutes to let it dry before you put on your work clothes or your school clothes because you’re not getting up three hours before you go to school or three hours before you go to work. Especially in my years, I’m past the years where I’m really raring to go to school, I’m at the sort of point where I’m just like ahh, I’ve got to get out of bed, gotta go to school. So I leave myself 45 minutes, half an hour, and I don’t really wanna be doing creams for 15 minutes of it then rushing to get to school, rushing to catch the bus, etcetera. And other things like creams that are sticky on your skin and they stick to your clothes and you’ve got like creams that do smell a little bit and you’ve got creams that leave like, like a shiny glaze over your skin. And you just think well I can’t really explain if someone asks what that is because you don’t wanna go into detail’, like I said you don’t wanna bring attention to yourself. And so that’s another few things that doctors don’t realise and their alternatives may be a bit- a little bit better but they’re still-, most creams do take time and do take-, well, a lot of time in the morning and in the evenings when sometimes you just wanna come home and go to bed or get up in the morning and quickly go off to school.

I think cos I’ve, applying hydrocortisone to my face. So, and I’ve applied like very thinly steroids to my face. So sometimes what I do, I don’t even know if it makes a difference, after I’ve put it on my body, you’ve then got, like you’re covered in ointment on your hands. But it’s very thin. I then, will then kind of go, like brush over my face with it. You know, cos it’s not like slapping it on. And then hydrocortisone, I generally apply that just around my nose and here. And I feel like I’ve got stretch marks around my nose from where I’ve, from where, from where I’ve been applying it. I feel like I’ve got stretch marks, kind of tiny ones and stuff like that. And I think that is a risk of- that you get from applying strong steroids ointments.

Did you say you’ve got different creams for different parts of the body?

Yeah and that was really confusing. Like, because I couldn’t use the cream that I had for my body on my face, because of it, I think it was steroid, or something, so I couldn’t use it on my face. So, I had to like label my creams of like Body’, Hair’, Face’; and then I also had one that I needed to put in the bath, and I had one that I had to put on after the bath, and it was all really confusing. But we labelled them and kept them all together, so that we knew which one was which.

None of them gave me side effects per se. The stronger steroids, you’re not supposed to put on your face for a long time because they thin your skin. And a long time is sort of months at a time. So I was getting towards the stage where I would be at risk of actually damaging my skin from putting steroids on for too long. But there wasn’t really another option at that point. So I sort of just took that risk and hoped for the best. And it did sort of go away. Especially from my face. It wasn’t on my face for much more than about two or three weeks. So I didn’t do myself any long term damage. But that was a worry, that I’d have to sort of keep chucking the stuff on and then it would eventually give me some problems. But it was that putting it on was much better than not putting it on. So you sort of had to go with it.

He [the doctor] said, Oh, like what about these patches on your face? or something like that. And then he gave me like a tiny tube of ointment that he just kind of pulled off the shelf or something like that and, called, I think it’s Dermovate. Which I don’t think you can, actually should put on your face. But he said, Well, use, like just put a bit of that on your face when you get home or something like that and see what happens. And so I went home with it. And it was this tiny tube and I was able to get everything out of the tube and I put it all over my body. And I woke up the next morning and my psoriasis was gone. And I just, I just remember it being the happiest, kind of like one of the happiest days of my life. Cos all of a sudden like something worked. Again, things did work in the past and then they stopped working. Some of them worked again. And this ointment worked. And I’ve been on that ointment ever since. And it’s not as great now. I can put it on and it won’t be gone by tomorrow. But if I put it on, I probably put it on like now. So this is like, it’s been like two or three years since like this one was given to me.

Usually they do, so usually they do listen to what I have to say. They might go and double-check it or something like that. They, what was it? Like they would, they would tell you to steer away from ointments. And I would often have to fight and, I’d get their reasoning behind it. I’d get that kind of the, Steroids, and it’s not good to pump your body with like, or apply all of these things to your body all the time. So they do, they used to try and kind of like move me away to some of the softer treatments, especially if it like, if it cleared up a bit. And then I would go to, to the GP. I would kind of ask for like what I’d been used to and then they’d ask to see my skin. And then they would be like, I think we should take it down a couple of notches because your skin’s looking all right at the moment. And I would say, No. Because I’m like, It might look all right at the moment. But when it’s gonna be bad I don’t want some shit kind of like thing that’s not gonna work. I want the strong stuff. And I would have to almost fight them for it.

And I do get their reasoning behind it. And I think that’s when you have to like, there’s the, obviously for your body I get what they’re saying in terms of, Okay, maybe you should try and, kind of like something weaker and see how that goes. But in terms of my mind, my mentality and how it’s making me feel, I don’t care. I want the stuff that’s stronger. So, and they often do kind of bow to that cos they see that’s, kind of like you’re quite desperate.

I remember this one time actually, again I actually went GP’s. And there’s nothing against them or anything like that. But I remember they, so Dermovate, you’ve got like the cream and you’ve got the ointment. And the ointment works better. The cream’s better in terms of like, I don’t know why the cream’s better, for some things. But I know the ointment works faster. And I remember I kept asking for ointment m-, because it said it worked faster. And the GP was like, No, the cream works faster. And, and I was like, No, the ointment does. And, and it wasn’t until I went back to see a dermatologist again because this doctor sh-, for some reason wasn’t giving me ointment. And I went to see, no, it wasn’t a dermatologist, I went to see someone else. And I was just like, and they were like Ah, do you not want the ointment? Cos it’s faster. And I was like, I knew it, I knew it was faster and stuff like that. So, and then since then I’ve been back on the ointment.