Not snake oil

So I keep seeing these ads on Facebook for a pill that stops itching. Apparently it works like a charm. I get all interested until I realize it's a pill for dogs. 

Move along

Nothing to say, I just wanted to make it so that the first post you see at my blog is not one about difficult struggles and so on. Instead, here's a picture of my dogs out on the deck on a hot, sunny day.

Of course, one might find it distressing to see so many weeds growing between the pavers, but today I am optimistic about getting the weeding done. Later I may post about my accomplishment of planting all the plants I have bought so far. That is better than I've done in probably seven or eight years.

Also, I have a nephew & family visiting soon who have teen and pre-teen kids and I may see if I can hire them to help with some deck cleanup. Sometimes when I talk about work like that my sister-in-law says, "That sounds like a job for strong, young grandchildren." I have no grandchildren, but she has. They are still young and strong, but not so young anymore that they are not busy with their own lives.

That's kind of a double-negative, in the grammatical sense, not emotional. Anyway, they are busy doing things like having jobs and getting engaged. I have another grandchild by proxy (i.e. great-niece) who lives locally but is too young for such labor.

So I am hoping the visiting greats will welcome an opportunity to earn some money while helping their old Auntie. (I like to pull out the Old Lady card when handy.) If not, I'll still get it done, just not as quickly. So no pressure, youngest generation.

Okay, one more photo. While I was writing this entry, I felt a warm little presence by my left foot, so I took a quick picture of what was under my desk chair.

Discomfort

I remember reading once, in a novel, a description of a character that he was “comfortable in his own skin.” It’s a figure of speech that indicates self-acceptance and confidence. Now, not as a metaphor, but as a physical fact, I am uncomfortable in my own skin. My skin is dry and itchy. I scratch the itches and my skin becomes raw and painful. And ugly. Sometimes I see it as so ugly that I tear at it with my fingernails, making it more raw, more painful, and more ugly.

When I go to bed at night, after I’ve been lying there a while, my skin starts to feel hot, tight, itchy, and painful. It is almost impossible for me not to scratch it. After a while, I feel so upset about the ugliness and unpleasantness and pain that I become stressed, unable to relax—almost twitchy. I keep lotions nearby to rub on to try to do that instead of scratch. Sometimes, after I’ve been asleep for a while, I wake up with these feelings and scratch in a half-sleepy state until I wake up enough to get up and go to the bathroom to clean my skin with cool water and a washcloth.

Sometimes I've taken Benadryl at bedtime with the idea that it may alleviate the itching and in any case it will make me drowsy. But eventually I felt like Benadryl was starting to trigger restless leg syndrome instead of putting me to sleep. I also tend to develop allergic reactions to any skin product that I use for a while.

During the day, while I’m sitting at my desk, or in my car, or—excuse me for mentioning it—on the toilet, I explore my skin with my fingers, finding rough spots that I want to scrape smooth. This leads to increasingly raw, painful, and ugly skin.

Sometimes after I’ve scratched the skin on my wrists and hands until I am bleeding, I apply an antibiotic balm and wrap my wrists and hands in cotton bandages. For a while, this is soothing, often even for the better part of a day. Eventually, the bandages become annoying and I cut them off.

Scratching until I bleed makes blood accumulate under my fingernails, so I spend time cleaning my nails. Because my skin may bleed at any given time, I wear dark clothes that won’t show blood spots. I wear a lot of black, navy blue, and brown. I wear shirts with long sleeves and full length pants. I can only wear cotton clothes, smooth cotton. Anything else feels painful when it touches my skin.

Sometimes I plan a skin-care session where I take a shower and then apply my latest remedy to my damp skin—over the counter lotion made for dry skin or a prescription thing (lotion isn’t quite the correct word as its consistency reminds me of Crisco). I do this when I have time to slather it on, then sit wrapped in a cotton robe or sheet until it absorbs and I feel less greasy and sticky. Another complication is that my dogs think lotion is tasty, and they try to lick any exposed part of me that has lotion on it. So I have to be able to spend time in my room with the door shut to keep the dogs away.

I’ve had a bit of a struggle with dry skin since childhood, but it has been at its absolute worst the past few years. When I was in about elementary school, I would scratch the lower part of my legs. My sister once laughed at an old photo of me at about 10 years old wearing shorts with knee socks. I definitely looked like a dork, but I needed knee socks to cover my scabs. As I moved into my teen years, I got better at putting lotion on every day and stopped having such itchy skin.

My skin was clear and acceptable looking (always pale and blotchy but at least not with open wounds) from about junior high until my 40s. It started up again with my lower legs and then my lower arms. I would always have one or two sores on an arm or leg, and I would try to keep them covered. My dad told me that he and his father had had the same thing.

My dad also suffered from psoriasis. All of my siblings and a significant proportion of my nephews and nieces have some form of skin issue—dry skin, psoriasis, eczema—some more severely than others.

So after my issues started to resurface in my 40s, I was at that relatively mild level for the next two decades. When it really became bad, with all the severe symptoms I’ve described, was during covid. I had some mental and emotional issues going into covid, mostly related to the decline and death of my parents, but I’ve had recurring bouts of depression since about age 10, so my mental health can range from getting along quite well to really feeling shitty.

I’m an extreme introvert and I would see memes about how introverts were loving covid isolation, but it didn’t work that way for me. My main feeling about the pandemic situation was that everything felt unnervingly weird. The situation was bizarre, and that stressed me out. Also, a few months into the isolation my dog, who’d been my dear companion for close to 15 years, died. More specifically, I made the decision to have him put down. Even now, tears come to my eyes as I remember that.

Sitting alone at my desk at home doing my office work—by the way, I was extremely thankful that I did not lose my job because of covid but had that steady income and benefits—but constant solitude gave me the opportunity to scratch and tear at my skin as often as the urge took me. No one could see me and be grossed out, so scratch and tear I did. I became more and more depressed and anxious until I really could not do anything my job required, nor could I care for myself or my house. I went days without showering, weeks where the only time I opened my door and left my house was to go to a grocery store to have my online order loaded into my car. I had gotten new puppies and their love was comforting, but I couldn’t train them or clean up after them. I finally had to take a medical leave of absence while I got medicated back up to functionality. Not to a high level of effectiveness, just functional.

I never caught the covid virus, but the pandemic still caused a severe (mental) health crisis that is still affecting me. Since getting effective meds, I no longer sit indoors with the shades down for days on end. I take showers, and I clean up dog poop. I was able to limp along, so to speak, with my job until I was eligible for Social Security and could retire. But the one thing that has not improved has been my skin.

I keep trying different approaches. Starting just the other night, I put a damp towel across my lower legs at bedtime, because that’s where the problem is the worst, and that cool, damp feeling did help soothe the pain and itch. I had a smaller damp cloth to wrap around whichever wrist felt worse. I hope that this tactic helps my condition to improve.

For several years, the way I am able to calm down and get to sleep is that I listen to and silently participate with the night prayer liturgy of the Divine Office, which I play on my phone from the Divine Office website. Night prayer is usually between 15 to 20 minutes long. Sometimes I fall asleep by the time it’s over. Otherwise, I move on to the Hallow app and listen to and silently pray along with the rosary, which lasts 20-25 minutes. I often fall asleep before that’s complete, but, if I don’t, I still feel more peaceful.

(I'm silent in my devotions so that my dogs don't think I'm talking to them and get excited.)

During the day, I try to spend some time using my hands to do needlepoint or write in a journal to give them something else to do besides check on how rough my skin feels. I only do brief journal entries; that’s all I’m up for. Since retiring, after I wake up and take my dogs outside, I come back to my bedroom with a cup of coffee and listen to and silently participate with the invitatory and morning prayer liturgies of the Divine Office.

But still my skin and I are in conflict. I am not comfortable in my own skin. I can only hope and pray and do my best to improve.

Keep on the sunny side

"Your nose is so delicious, mom."

About a month ago, I started a Word document that I call “Positive Accomplishments,” in which I list under the date any things that I did that I can consider positive actions to boost my mental health. Sometimes it’s things like “Washed some dishes,” “Washed & dried a load of laundry,” “Raked leaves on my deck.” Other times it’s things like “Went out to lunch with friends,” “Blogged,” or “Sat in the sun.” 

I have a southern exposure on my deck. One side of the deck is shaded by the upstairs deck and the other side is in full sun. Today I sat in the sun. A special thing that may happen while I’m sitting in the sun in an Adirondack chair is that all three of my dogs want to join me there. And by “special,” I mean “utterly ridiculous.” There is not ample room for the three of them, and two of them (the bitches) do not like to share space and so express hostility to one another and the hapless boy dog, Benedict (who just wants to get along). Also, Rosamund really, really wants to lick my nose. For a long time. Non-stop. So I have to hold her off while she tries and tries to get in my face. It’s nice to be loved, I guess.

Nevertheless, it is overall a positive experience.

We call this Friday good

More than a decade ago, at work, someone said to me, “Happy Good Friday!” which struck me as wildly inappropriate. I wondered if he spoke from ignorance or from mockery. He was not a co-worker but a co-tenant of the building where I worked, and he was a strange fellow. (In case anyone doesn’t know, Good Friday commemorates Jesus’s crucifixion—not a happy occasion.)

Remembering that greeting this morning, I also remembered the line, “In spite of that, we call this Friday good.” I thought it came from a John Donne poem, so I searched online and found, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.” I found a youtube of someone named John Melton reading it. I don’t know anything about Mr. Melton, but he did a good job reading the poem. However, it did not contain the line I had thought of.

It turns out the line comes from T.S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” one of his “Four Quartets.” It could also have come from somewhere else; Eliot was a great one for quoting others in his poems. “East Coker” is a relatively long poem; the line comes at the end of part IV. I found a recording of Eliot himself reading it, but he is not the best reader of his own work; he is rather affectless. So I found a recording of Ralph Fiennes reading it, and that was better.

So, yes, this is the day of the agonizing death of our Lord. He was the lamb sacrificed for our sins—the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. That is why, in spite of his suffering and death, we call this Friday good. 

Being seen

“Thou God seest me.” My Grandma on my dad’s side embroidered that and had it framed. The cloth she embroidered on was an old shirt of my Grandpa’s.

The words are from Genesis, Chapter 16. Hagar, a slave, has been used and mistreated by the great patriarch Abram/Abraham and his wife, Sarai/Sarah. They have used her as a surrogate to bear Abraham a child. Abraham has used her as a concubine, but once she is pregnant, Sarah mistreats her and Abraham does not interfere. So she runs away, but she encounters the angel of the Lord, who tells her to return to Abraham and Sarah and prophesies that the child she carries will have countless descendants.

The God Who Sees Me by Patricia Ewing

The King James Version of the Bible then says, “And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.” The New International Version has, “She gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me.’” (This is verse 13.)

Yesterday, I went to look something up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is online at the website of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. I browsed my way into the section on Christian prayer. In defining prayer, the Catechism alludes to the story of the woman at the well (John 4), where Jesus begins a conversation with the woman by asking for a drink of water. The Catechism says:

Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.

I also watched a video, “How God speaks to us in daily life.” A priest in Great Britain, Father Stephen Wang, has a Youtube channel called Pause for Faith. In this particular video, his discussion of prayer draws on the story of two of John the Baptizer’s disciples who follow Jesus—literally—after John points him out as the Lamb of God (John 1). Father Wang dwells on the fact that, as they walk behind him, Jesus turns around and sees them and asks, “What do you want?” So, again, the emphasis is on the Lord’s initiative: he turns around and he sees them. 

It is a commonplace in psychology that people want to be seen, that being seen is a basic human need. If we feel invisible, unlooked for, unseen, we can remember this name of the Lord:

Thou God seest me.

Let the pottering commence

We have had some beautiful weather the last few days, sunny and mild. I have sometimes left my door standing open in the afternoons, letting fresh air in and allowing my dogs to run in and out at will. It really feels like spring.

The forecast predicts this weather will last two more days, then start to cloud up, and then will start cool, rainy days for the foreseeable future. So carpe diem. Make hay while the sun shines. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Time’s wingèd chariot and all that sort of thing.

I have been clearing leaves out of plant containers and adding soil, to get them ready to receive new plants. Last year, again, I bought plants that I never transferred to the containers. Part of my work today was dumping dirt out of the little plastic starter pots. 

I bought four English lavender last year and never transplanted them, yet they seem to have survived the winter albeit in a somewhat bedraggled state. I ruthlessly pruned them this afternoon, and we’ll see if they come back. 

This year, I really believe, will be the year I make my comeback in growing flowers on my deck. I used to make my deck a bower of delight with fragrant and beautiful plants, but a year or two before my parents died, or maybe longer, I just didn’t have the energy. Since then, every year, I’ve bought plants and every year not planted them. I think it will be different this year because I am retired. I no longer have to get it done on the weekend or else. I can go outside and do a little work, then come in, and I can do that any day or every day.

When I was approaching retirement, when people asked me what I was going to do with my time, I replied, “Potter. Potter around my house and garden.” This week, I’ve been pottering on my deck, and it’s been wonderful.

Container with honeysuckle. 

Cleaned up and added a layer of new soil.

Cleaned up this stone (actually resin)
that had been covered with dirt and mold.

My pot of herbs.
The rosemary thrives through the winter,
and the chives come back every year.
Sage & thyme were looking sorry
in the pots they were in when I bought them.
I planted them to see if they'll revive.