Hidradenitis Suppurativa Is A Bad Tenant

My skin is multi-faceted. It betrays me and my secrets with a bright red blush. (Shhhhh! Can you please not tell everyone I’m embarrassed, skin?!) It pops great big welts when exposed to cats and dogs. (I really think you should rethink your stance on allergies, skin. Cats and dogs are lovely.) People guess me to be about 15 years younger than I am on a regular basis. (Thank you, skin, you are fabulous!)

An uninvited guest

But there is this one thing, this one character if you will; this one started as the overnight guest that I expected to just stay one night on the couch. (Oh, hi, bump. I’m sure you’ll be leaving soon.) But then it turned into a week. As soon as my back was turned, it’s as if it ate all of my food out of my fridge, threw stinky socks all over my floors, left empty rolls instead of refilling the toilet paper, and weirdly subscribed me for random magazine subscriptions. I mean, who gets magazines anymore?? Okay, I’m getting carried away. I’m talking about hidradenitis suppurativa, or HS for short. HS has become that squatter that will never leave.

My skin has been all kinds of things to me. But I’ve never had a resident like this, one that I’ve had to embrace as part of my skin, an awful reality, for the rest of my life. And by awful, I mean AWFUL. Painful, stinky, painful, oozing, painful, embarrassing, painful, alienating, and, well, painful. We don’t get a great variety of adjectives.

It started with one

Just like that overnight guest on the couch, my HS started as one spot. In fact, for a few years, it was one spot or a cluster of spots but it would stay in one location. It would always throw a terrible fit, and then go dormant for a month or two.

But then it started demanding more. My skin was still dealing with other tenants too, but wow, this squatter posing as a friend was partying 24/7. I didn’t realize it, but I was becoming stressed over the HS lesions that were developing, and HS can be triggered as a result of hormones being imbalanced, so it produces more HS lesions - which would then in turn stress me out even more.

The party crashers

The couch surfer was also letting other nefarious characters in on the sly to party. This is the stuff we aren’t really as aware of, or maybe don’t like to think about. Meat like chicken, beef, and pork being given hormones? What if that affects our HS? What about when we’re done stuffing our faces and we’ve got leftovers for days, and we’re packing everything into plastic containers? Is the food going to soak up some good ol’ chemicals that mimic hormones that make our hidradenitis suppurativa go absolutely bonkers? And what about materials in our houses? Those chemicals give off hormone disruptors that no 1980s safety dance could ever block.

On top of that, sweat, irritating clothing (either too tight or too loose, depending on your preferences), smoking, and body parts rubbing together at certain junctures in locations like underarms can also cause HS to flare up with more bumps. I mean really, that sounds like a party, doesn’t it? But obviously it’s the party that everyone talks about on Monday morning that went down as one of the worst ever.

It's not your fault

Some people blame themselves for allowing HS to crash on their couches/take up residency, but really, it’s not our fault. It turns out that hidradenitis suppurativa didn’t start out on the couch. It has been living in the attic long before it made an appearance on the couch. In other words, it probably has been lurking around in our genetic material, possibly even in our familial genetic material, and just needed a trigger to start showing up.

I would like to respectfully request my fellow patients with hidradenitis suppurativa to show a little love or encouragement to your skin. We did not open the door and invite this fiend in. Your skin is doing the best it can with what it’s got. It may be laying on the floor and having a pathetic slow-motion slap fight with HS, but it’s still fighting. It has an incredibly big job to do to protect you and keep you safe from all sorts of invaders.