The First Time I went Into Withdrawals (Without Realising it)

Its funny how something can spark a long-buried memory or trigger something in your brain. A phone call a few weeks ago led to me remembering something that happened about 13 years ago. I was actually in steroid withdrawals without realising it. Sit down comfortably and I will tell you my story....

I was chatting with my mother in law (yes, we are friends!) on the phone and she was telling me how she had been looking over some old diaries from 1999 when I was pregnant with my first child. She said she had made a lot of entries in the diary about how bad my eczema was. This was what caused all my memories to come flooding back.

When I found myself pregnant with my first child, I had already been using moderate to strong steroid creams daily for about 3 years. In other words, I was addicted to them but didn't know it. The discovery that I was pregnant made me paranoid about doing everything right. I only ate the healthiest foods and I stopped using my steroid creams for fear of harming the baby. Of course, within a week of stopping the creams, my skin went crazy. Of course, I thought it was the pregnancy affecting my skin. I also thought that my eczema was bad because I needed the steroid creams.

My skin got so bad, my poor hubby, who was working nights at the time was finding it hard to look after me and get enough sleep, so I went to stop at my mom's house for a few days. I was lying on the settee, red from top to toe and my mom was using non-steroid creams on me. I think she used 50/50 WSP and liquid paraffin. As you can imagine, my skin went bonkers, craving the steroid creams. This was the first time I noticed the ooze and the ooze smell. "What the heck is that weird smell?" I thought, but dismissed it as being overly sensitive due to pregnancy.

My skin got worse and I was crying all the time. It hurt to wash my skin. I remember saying something stupid, like I wanted to die, which upset my mom and dad. They didn't realise how bad my skin felt. It was like I was on fire. Movement was agony. I worried about the stress affecting the little life in my tummy.

After I went back home, we got an emergency appointment with the dermatologist at the hospital. I remember sitting in the waiting room wailing and sobbing with pain. She saw me straight away and said that it was safe for me to use the steroids in pregnancy and whisked me away to a treatment room where the nurse daubed tube after tube of eumovate ointment on my skin before wet wrapping me in bandages to let it soak in deeply. Naturaly i thought that the dermatologist was the greatest person in the world.

For the rest of my pregnancy I remember ordering a tube of Eumovate a week. I got through tons of it. Luckily, my baby was born without complications, although I continued to use steroids whilst breastfeeding the poor little fella. He is very lucky that he didn't end up addicted to steroids.

I WISH I had known then what I know now. It is so obvious that the agony was due to steroid withdrawal, but I knew nothing about it at the time. The sad thing is that if I had, I could have withdrawn a lot easier, having only 3 years steroid use under my belt. After that I went on to use steroids daily until November 2011, when I stopped. Goodness knows what further damage those years of applications did to my skin and blood vessels.