My Polymorphic Light Eruption

I don’t have rabies or anything crazy, it’s only a skin condition that feels horrible and looks completely unattractive. It developed it after I spent a couple years living under the eternal rain cloud that covers Portland, OR from October to May. Here’s the timeline:

2011 July: I move to Portland from sunny Toulouse after studying there for a year.

2012 December 30: I go to Miami and to spend time with my Cousin for NYE in a warm place while it is storming in Portland:


This is when it first happened… dun dun dun: my stomach erupts with these dime-sized red dots everywhere. At first it’s just red, and then it gets itchy. The worst is that the space between these dots stay completely white. It’s like my body forgot how to tan.

And so I go home, and they disappear within a day. I forget about it.

Summer of 2013: The dots come back, especially furiously early on, and they get less and less vehement by the end of the summer. I basically ignore it, mostly because I don’t spend very much time outside because of work.

Summer of 2014-2015: I put a lot of sunscreen on, but the red dots still make a comeback, including some side trips I take to Australia in the spring.

Summer of 2016: I’m fed up. I start researching the key words “sun allergy”, “sun rash”, “red dots from sun” all these come up with a lot of symptoms that are similar, but there is one key thing missing: why does the sun rash I have get less intense after more months of exposure. That is when I finally searched for something to the effect of: “sun allergy that gets better with time in the sun”. And bingo: I find a blog about how a woman had conducted an experiment on herself for ten years, using only one lotion every summer to see how well it works against her condition. That is where I find many lotions that kinda-sorta help, but the 10th one was the 100% awesome solution. It is this shirudo lotion made in Montreal.

January 2017: I got a big tube of the creme at the end of last summer, and this year is the first year I’ve tried the creme, and it works like a charm. Now my skin tans like it did before, it’s not itchy, and I can say it’s the best thing ever, and a mystery solved!

 

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