Psoriasis is the reason I skulked through adolescence like an albino leopard. I was shy enough when I started secondary school; when my pale skin developed red, angry and often bleeding plaques of psoriasis, from my bony knees to my spotty brow, my desire to disappear forever into the treetops of introspection was complete.
From the age of twelve, my greasy, gangling body added psoriasis to my list of reasons to hate myself. Not only did it make wearing clothes unbearable and taking them off unthinkable, it crept skyward to cover my face as well. By the age of 15 I’d passed 6’5” and become a towering beacon of embarrassment.
Psoriasis affects perhaps 2% of the white population. It is non-contagious, chronic and inherited. It is part of my genetic blueprint. Even apparently unaffected skin on a sufferer is bio-chemically different to that of a non-sufferer.
Psoriasis typically makes patches of skin rise, become inflamed and shed abundant silver ‘scales’. My skin generates new cells faster then the old ones can be shed, causing a dermal logjam. The skin occasionally splits and bleeds and always itches damnably. Some sufferers have a couple of patches here and there. Others have swathes of the stuff cladding their bodies like a glued-on hairshirt.
As I came to terms with psoriasis in the mid eighties, Dennis Potter’s excellent TV drama, ‘The Singing Detective’, had special resonance for me. Its protagonist, Marlowe, was hospitalised by a voracious form of psoriasis that enveloped his entire body. Trapped in a hospital bed and mired in unguents, Marlowe escaped into a world of imagination in which he was the urbane sleuth in a world of post-war noir. Marlowe wasn’t a prisoner of his wretched body and neither was I. Even if he was a prisoner, he had Joanne Whalley as a warder.
I’ve evolved a complex relationship with my skin involving a lot of cod psychology and minimal medical help. Psoriasis is acutely psychosomatic; it is exacerbated and often initiated by emotional trauma. In a few months, I went from unthinking contentment at primary school to desperate misery at secondary school. Psoriasis leapt from my genes and painted my woes all over my skin.
Psoriasis responds badly to any state of being more stressful than a coma. Any kind of emotional or physical trauma will leave its paw-prints on my dermis. Caffeine, salt and alcohol in any pleasurable quantity will exact a price in a pain like sunburn.
Besides watching my diet, I should use creams and ointments to control the plaques. In the past, this has meant coal tar based concoction ns that will turn a clean bed-sheet into a Glastonbury groundsheet in one sticky night. It has meant steroid based liquids that thin the skin and burn through floorboards if spilled. Latterly it has meant ‘Dovonex’, a less offensive palliative than its forebears.
Escaping the hormonal maelstrom of my teens cooled my psoriasis. Yet attitude is the key for me. The more I agonised about my appearance, or fretted about the unlikelihood of ever getting the girl, or any girl, or anything female with a pulse, the worse it got. By learning to treat it with the contempt it deserved, I eased my symptoms. Simplistic as it sounds, growing up, acquiring confidence and deciding I wasn’t a leper cleansed much of my skin.
Baring any part of yourself feels courageous if your psoriasis is highly visible. I remember being ejected from a swimming pool in France by an attendant who seemed to think I’d escaped from a germ warfare lab. Pushy as he was, he didn’t dare touch me. My schoolboy French equipped me to ask him for directions to the beach or whether he preferred Duran Duran to Kajagoogoo. It didn’t help me explain the pathology of discoid psoriasis. Because of incidents like this, girls treated me like a puppy with a broken paw, adorable in an entirely sexless way. Come to think of it, nothing’s changed.
Later in life, what was left of my psoriasis was aggravated by my cavalier attitude to medication, alcohol and late nights. Only in my early thirties did it occur to me to look again at what medicine could offer. I was told that creams weren’t the only answer. A drug called Methotrexate slows cellular division in the skin and will clear psoriasis within 8 weeks. It also has side effects including anaemia and liver damage. Other drugs are available, all with equally unpleasant side effects. My hunger for medical martyrdom doesn’t stretch that far.
Then I tried a course of phototherapy. Psoriasis responds well to sunlight, less so to sun-beds which only operate in cosmetic wavelengths. Three times a week for about two months, I attended the local hospital where I stepped into a clinical solarium and was bombarded with narrow spectrum UVB light.
The dosage is powerful and initial sessions lasted a few seconds, eventually building up to around three minutes. To preserve my eyesight and my heritage during treatment, I was told to wear dark goggles and a single sock. The elderly gent who turned up for his first session starkers but for a sock on his right foot either failed to get the point, or proved that nurses’ uniforms hold a timeless appeal.
After six weeks of treatment and for the first time in twenty years, my skin was entirely clean but for mottled white patches where the plaques used to be. It didn’t last; it’s programmed into my genes, so my idiotic skin cells will keep repeating their errors forever.
As chronic disorders go, psoriasis isn’t a hard cross to bear, although the coal-tar gloop with which I once had to coat myself twice daily made my grip a tad slippery. The constant itch is like the smell of oxygen, or the sound of traffic for someone living on a busy road. Because it’s there all the time, it ceases to be noticed. I only focus on it when it’s severe or when it ceases. I’m told that when my skin is bad, I tire easily and become irritable. As excuses go, that’ll do.
