Hello, and Happy Spring!

This journey to healing is what I plan to begin posting in an effort to see if others have had a similar journey. I’ve constructed a few ‘pillars’ in my journey to improving my health that I will reference as decision points or “milemarkers” where I made a turn on Recovery Blvd – six to be exact: Psoriasis Road, Gut Service Road & the Gut Health Highway, Depression/Anxiety Lane, Thyroid Street, Joints Turnpike, Highway to Obesity, and Longevity Drive. (The actual healing journey that I am taking is separately documented using a daily journal and will be published at some point.)

Now, when you hear the term “psoriasis”, what comes to mind for you? Used to be that, for me, psoriasis is what people got in their hair. Dandruff. Purchase the appropriate hair shampoo and you are cured. When my psoriasis appeared as a little spot the size of an ingrown hair on my left leg, my inclination was to slap some cream on my really dry skin, quit whining, and move on with life. As you can see, the little red dot on my leg has turned into quite the situation.

My first ‘milemarker’ in my journey is healing my psoriasis. This process is the most confusing and is driving my trip to Longevity Drive. The realization that that this part of my journey is to be a major cornerstone for my own longevity and bright future rests well with me for it is my main obtacle to overcome. I’d like to also help others with similar situations with is why I’m taking my time to really sort this out. I have found that my focus needs to be on improving my health and not just ‘losing weight’. This is the first photo I took of my legs (red sock). I sent the photo to my mom to have her see what I kept referring to as my dry legs. This was after over 10 years of trying to get rid of the lesions. It is a very slow moving disease with me.

Yes, my psoriasis began – or so I thought – with the appearance of a small and barely noticeable lesion that would not heal. Determined I had skin cancer, I made the first of what would be rounds of dermatology appointments. However, later in my journey, I began to realize the my psoriasis was the result of something much more, and began much earlier than the presentation of a small dot on my leg. This journey was fraught with misinformation or just ill-informed medical professionals who are to geared to a drug prescription pad solution. Here are a few ‘shocks’ I discovered along the way which really shaped my treatment plan…or lack thereof.

Shock #1 – Medical Treatment of an Autoimmune Disorder. When my psoriasis lesion presented in 2003, I was told to just watch it. I’ve since come to realize that this advice was very bad. Because the lesion was too small to be treated and, with my history of cancer, no one would prescribe really strong drugs for such a small issue. (Good, because I didn’t want them anyway.) I also had a severe Vitamin D deficiency; where normal was 40, I had 10. This factor was overlooked by my dermatologist.

While the guidance of ‘do nothing’ was bad, this doctor could have prescribed strong drugs to kill my immue system when, in fact, my immune system was working as expected. My doctor just didn’t view psoriasis that way. I hope that the past 20 years have helped to educate him.

What I didn’t know is that I would hear this phrase for the next 20 years: Too small, not severe enough, etc. When did this little skin issue become “severe enough” to be treated? Surely, there was some cause, wasn’t there? More little spots began to appear looking like a little scrapes or knicks. Again, too small to be given oral medication (Again, Thank You!), and too much to be totally ignored. Yet, I did just that with one exception: I began to document my journey in pictures. This is the same leg, about a month later, right after a flare up. A few things to notice here. While the lesions look about the same, the redness surrounding them indicate a flaring of the wound. During a flare, everything becomes inflamed. Swollen legs and feet. My joints would ache. Towards the end of whatever would exacerbate the lesions, I would observe that the red areas now became part of the whole. Like the spread of ooze, my psoriasis crept into the healthy skin. This photo is at the end of a flare when my legs became normal again and I could see the psoriasis become larger as a result of the flare. Also, I noted the difference in leg size. This was when I realized that there may be a correlation of swelling to flare ups. My legs would swell for about two days and, then, become really thin. I could not correlate to any cause but knew there was something else, something more insidious that was part of my daily life.

I also noted that the lesions became larger within the inflammation itself. While swollen legs, feet and hands had afflicted me pretty much my entire life, I had always discounted this as just part of being me. Instead of deciding that I just skulk off into the corner, I began to become more proactive about whether or not everybody suffered as I did with swollen legs and feet. (I learned they didn’t.) Then, I began to question the treatment plan and considered this question: What if the treatment plan that has been proposed was inappropriate? (It was, for it did not search the cause but offered BandAid solutions.) During this time, I began to test certain things and looked for a dietary correlation. Changing my perspective a bit, I wondered if there was another ’cause’ for my brand of psoriasis and is there any role of bodily inflammation in a skin disorder? Inflammation is my name; disease is my game. More on that in another post. The journey was very long, windy, and extremely helpful…which lead me to shock #2.

Shock #2. Psoriasis has an internal causation. My own research showed me that psoriasis is not a skin disorder. While it presents on the skin, the ’cause’ is internal and psoriasis is labled as an ‘autoimmune’ disorder. And, do you think the medical doctor EVER told me this? No. I had to research this myself. Why would I not have been sent to an autoimmune specialist? Well, because psoriasis is labeled by the medical establishment as a skin condition because that is all people see.

We need to look past the presentation and, like obesity, challenge that these disorders are reflections of personal behavior because, frankly, they aren’t. That viewpoint, then, impacts one’s treatment options when your medical doctor believes that you are the cause of your own disease. Our medical establishment treats results because that is monetized and can be clearly justified. So, in a cut, we treat the result by using stitches and bandages. However, if the person endured their cut during an argument or violent fight, treating the injury does not solve the problem, does it? While this is an extreme example, it clearly highlights that disease may be a result of something else and not necessarily just my body going bad. Bodies don’t go bad, they are mistreated and have an unexpected result from the mistreatment.

Shock #3 – There is no treatment that will “fix” my psoriasis. Let’s fast forward now so that all of the boring past, trials and tribulations, can serve as my ‘road to recovery’. This is my psoriasis on June 19, 2021. I really believe the worsening of my symptoms was exacerbated by the Pandemic and being confined to the house. This, too, is the subject of a series of prior posts so I won’t go into this right here in any detail. Just know that I gained a siginficant amount of weight and leaned into anything and everything I ate from my childhood. This is also where I learned that I used food to soothe my anxiety and depression. The back of my leg is equally as inflamed with these sores. I’m showing only my left leg in comparison just to save and limit the yuckiness of my legs. My right leg is a bit better but shows the same progression. (The original lesion from 2003 was on my left leg so I call it ‘my older sores’.) Each spreading was denoted by small red spots or blotches that just became larger and larger. Today, this has spread to my elbows, hands, face, and nose. All of this spreading is after light treatment, oral therapies (yes, one doctor presribed one where I got extremely ill), topical therapies, and various different diet options. Nothing helped.

Shock #4 – The medical establishment does not provide prevention tips; they treat the disease. This may not always be the best course of action. This was not a new idea to me but I always just wondered more like a “What if” scenario. What if this skin disorder wasn’t caused by my body deciding it was breaking? Throughout my entire psoriasis experience, I would wonder about this and actually asked a few times about dietary correlations or other environmental causes. The answer of your body is just broken made more sense to my doctors when, in fact, I later discovered that my psoriasis IS the reflection of some underlying cause. This, I learned, by researching medical journals and SCIENCE. Yes, SCIENCE. Then, I took a step back and really looked at medical treatment and if I even received adequate treatment. Up until that point, the thought would just pass in and out, like a fleeting image. And, just recently, life gave me my answer.

This is one of those moments where you are just stunned into the truth of the matter. Sort of a ‘stunned to silence’ situation. I have a few of them in my life and this most recent experience was definitely one of them. It was this experience that solidified my hypothesis that is Shock #4. My GP/doctor is monitoring me for high blood pressure. In my most recent appointment in 2023, I was congratulated for losing 30 pounds. My weight, however, was incorrectly recorded for I had only lost 6 pounds. These 6 pounds, however, were and still are a monumental achievement for I lost them not through restriction but through conscious choice. Looking confused, my doctor read my recorded weight taken just 10 minutes prior – and I had to correct her because the last two numbers were transposed. A slight error? Well, in this same visit, I was asked if I wanted a dermatological referral – a full 20 years after my initial psoriasis diagnosis AND after I discussed in depth with this doctor during prior visits. Horrified and stunned, I just clammed up and that was that. This event was also when I realized that I needed to, once again, be my own counsel for the medical establishment was ill-equipped and unprepared to handle more complex situations of multiple symptoms that do not appear related. I needed a medical establishment that supported proactive healing and not always a pharmaceutical “solution”. And, after this recent visit, I don’t believe such exists…in this country anyway.

I began to consider my non-pharmaceutical options and once again began my research but with a new focus. You see, one of my GPs about 10 years ago muttered something about ‘vascular’ and told me to continue to see the dermatologist but we may want a vascular referral. (She has since left that practice.) I really had no idea what she meant. The only ‘vascular’ doctor I was aware of were surgeons and I certainly was not going to waste a surgeon’s time without a formal referral.

The idea, however, of an internal vascular cause for my psoriasis stayed with me. My research considered this and I began to search for a vascular possibility as the cause of my skin condition and I found a more formal term for my swelling: inflammation. By this point, I had noted and correlated the severe swelling in my legs and feet that I had always had to my psoriasis flares. In fact, I was so concerned that I was screened for psoriatic arthritis as a result of joint pain. (Negative for psoriatic arthritis, positive for osteoarthritis. Again, I have since learned that this is textbook progression of our aging process.) In bringing inflammation up to my doctor, however, the idea was quickly dismissed and the steroid route was once again discussed. This was when I realized that my psoriasis would continue despite my use of steroid and vitamin creams; I just knew that there had to be some other ‘source’ or the ‘original site’ of whatever was resulting in my psoriasis. I began to conduct my own research on vascular issues and skin disorders. Then, and this is very random, I began to wonder if the ‘particles’ or whatever my body was interpreting as a skin or autoimmune disorder was ‘pooling’ in my lower extremities due to poor circulation. Could that be a thing? I witnessed my mother-in-law and my own mother dealing with water coming through the skin on their legs. In both cases, my mother-in-law and mother would have been helped with exercise. Could psoriasis be like this but not with water but with ‘body junk’ or the results of some environmental cause that was slowly killing me? Then, I began to ponder that, in this case, what was the one thing I could do to help myself?

And that single question, my friends, was when I stumbled on the beauty and adventure of my lifetime.

My road to healing began with an exercise bike and a manicure.

More to come. Be gentle and go in peace.