Alice

Age at interview: 22

Age at diagnosis: 7

Brief Outline: Alice was 7 when her GP confirmed eczema. She has tried various emollients with limited success as well as steroid creams for worse flare ups. Moisturising with non-prescription lotions is a key way in which Alice now manages her eczema.

Background: Alice is 22 and a postgraduate University student. She is single and lives in shared accommodation. Her ethnicity is White British.

More about me...

Alice was diagnosed with eczema by her GP at the age of 7. It was around this time that she also had a skin-prick test and learnt that she has a number of allergies; for example, dust and pollen, which cause her to sneeze and itch. She does not feel that eczema has ever really been explained to her in great depth and she was uncertain about the links between eczema, allergies and asthma. Alice feels that many of the healthcare professionals that she has seen have not been overly concerned with her eczema, unless it is particularly visible and close to her face/head. She has tried a number of prescribed emollients which have not made much of a difference and finds that only steroid creams help with particularly bad flare ups. The cost of prescriptions mean that Alice tends to manage her eczema by applying branded, non-medicated and readily-available moisturisers several times a day. 

The itchiness of her skin caused some issues for Alice and her family when she was a child, such as preventing her from playing outside and raising concerns at school when she refused to wear warmer clothes like jumpers. Some of these experiences from having eczema as a child have continued to influence her activities and feelings now. This is especially so for some parts of her skin such as her forearms and upper chest. For example, she still dislikes wearing clothes with long sleeves, preferring to wear layers instead, and she avoids woolly fabrics as well as “constrictive” necklaces. Alice was also concerned that her eczema might damage the colouring of her tattoos and she takes extra care when dyeing her hair to avoid worsening an eczema patch on her neck.

Alice did not initially think that her eczema has much of an impact on her life, especially when compared to her other health concerns. However, she reflected on this during the interview and was surprised by the ways that eczema does actually feature in her life quite a lot. Although Alice thought that more information at the time of diagnosis would have been helpful, she feels that she currently manages her eczema quite well as a result of having had it for so many years.

Alice developed eczema in her scalp. She worried about what people thought when she scratched her head, but her doctor and hair dresser weren’t too bothered.

‘Cos I bleach my hair, I have like a patch of eczema on the back of my scalp so whenever I would like bleach my hair to dye it – it would really, really aggravate it so my skin at the back of my neck is really itchy so I’m always scratching and people think I’ve got head lice or something. And it was really bad for a while it was like swollen and peeling and disgusting.

I was more worried that I was allergic to hair dye [laughs] ‘cos if I had to stop dying my hair I don’t know what I’d do. Yeh, no, that was what I was worried about but then I mentioned to the doctor at some point that I thought it might be eczema related and that seemed to solve the matter.

I think when it’s like near your head or like your brain or something maybe they’re a bit more worried about it but I don’t know. Yeh so I just said that it had been quite bad and she had a look at it and it was like peeling and itchy and disgusting-looking so they just gave me some stuff for it but even that wasn’t something that they were really worried about, even the hairdressers carried on whacking bleach on it the same, it wasn’t like, it wasn’t like they refused to touch it or anything so.

Having had eczema since she was very young, Alice hasn’t been given as much information about the condition as she would have liked.

I probably would have preferred to have some information about what eczema is ‘cos I mean I know I’ve never bothered to look it up myself but I don’t think anyone ever actually explained to me what it is really and what can set it off and what is associated with like, is it associated with asthma and allergies and stuff like that, I don’t really know these are just things that I think.

Some of the triggers for Alice’s eczema also affect other related conditions she has, such as asthma and allergic rhinitis.

One of my other medical things is I have like a, I think it’s called allergic rhinitis where my nose is permanently blocked basically and dust and mould and stuff trigger that off so if I’m in like a kind of damp house or something, like my house in second year was really, really damp and it made that worse but I think in my mind eczema and those like the dust and mould allergies are kind of related because when I’m sneezing I get itchy as well.

So yeh so I’d consider allergies to be more of an impact on me because they’re something that I can't deal with so much.

Alice talks about clothes, including the feel of different fabrics, and her eczema.

I don’t like wearing long sleeves anyway just because of the residual memory of having itchiness there. But if I had my sleeves pulled down it would kind of get stuck to the inside and that would make it more itchy as well because then the fibres and stuff would get stuck to me and it’s just ergh. I tend to find it more of a problem on my upper body with the sticking to things, like if I’m wearing tights over the moisturiser or whatever – that’s okay, I can kind of deal with that but I’m not sure what it is, maybe it’s a psychological thing but having it stuck on the inside of my arms just makes me feel really horrible.

Yeh, there’s lots of different fabrics that I can’t, I just can’t wear. I can’t wear like woolly jumpers or anything like that because it’s just too itchy – it just makes my skin feel horrible and I sit there scratching constantly. even like, when I was little I couldn’t wear like thick jumpers or anything even if it wasn’t woolly jumpers and as a result I was always like running around with just a T-shirt on because when my skin got too hot my eczema would flare up and that still is something that I, I don’t know, I suppose it still has an impact on me now because I still don’t like wearing lots of layers in case my skin gets too hot and like sticky and itchy so that's the main thing. Washing my clothes I’m not really sure I don’t think that washing powder has an impact but then I noticed more recently that when I was fishing some of my like undergrad clothes out of my cupboard that were really dusty, that definitely set it off again.

Alice’s GP recommended she try a shop-bought moisturiser when she was diagnosed with eczema at age 7.

Yeh and the doctors didn't really do very much about it. In fact I was thinking about this the other day, they’d never really given me anything for it. I remember being recommended this stuff from The Body Shop which was like this hemp cream and there was one that smelt kind of like that and there was another one which smelt like earth, it just smelt like soil that they gave me and I think that was the only thing they’d ever given me to deal with it.

Alice doesn’t like wearing long sleeved tops because of the memory of clothes sticking to moisturisers on her arms.

I don’t like wearing long sleeves anyway just because of the residual memory of having itchiness there. But if I had my sleeves pulled down it would kind of get stuck to the inside and that would make it more itchy as well because then the fibres and stuff would get stuck to me and it’s just ergh. I tend to find it more of a problem on my upper body with the sticking to things, like if I’m wearing tights over the moisturiser or whatever – that’s okay, I can kind of deal with that but I’m not sure what it is, maybe it’s a psychological thing but having it stuck on the inside of my arms just makes me feel really horrible.

Alice doesn’t like going to the beach or swimming in the sea because of the impact on her eczema.

I think the only thing I can think of is going swimming in the sea. If I were to do that there would be [laughs] a long kind of ritual afterwards with having to wash the salty water off and moisturise all over again because sea water makes it just flare up really badly and that was something that I had when I was little as well. I remember it just being a nightmare coming out of the sea afterwards and then just being itchy everywhere and stuff and then I suppose it’s also an element of having the sand stuck to you and like pebbles and stuff, ergh, ergh, just, yeh, that would be the main thing that I would avoid doing. other than that I can’t really, even actually swimming at the swimming pool – chlorine, it doesn’t make it flare up but when I get out of the pool my skin just feels really itchy and horrible, so that would be another incident of having to like grease myself up again [laughs] afterwards, yeh, generally stuff like that.

Cat fur triggers Alice’s eczema when she visits her family home.

When I was little and we found out I was allergic to cats, the cats that we had were short haired ones that weren’t a problem anyway but now my mum recently got a ragdoll cat [laughs] which is like the fluffiest creature you can imagine and it’s not really part of the conversation anymore, I just deal with those things, I think. sometimes if I’m sat at home sneezing then my mum will say “Oh you’ve been sniffing the cat” but [laughs] yeh I think it’s just, I think it made an impact when I was younger but not so much now.

Alice doesn’t get prescribed emollient but still finds shop-bought moisturisers add up.

Thinking about it, it must cost me a lot of money to go through all of that moisturiser – a while ago I was clearing out my room when I just had pots and pots and pots of moisturiser and I dread to think how much I spend on that ‘cos it’s not cheap, it’s like £4 a bottle and I go through one about every two weeks. So that must cost me a lot of money. And prescription charges are a lot these days, that’s probably one of the reasons I don’t go to the doctor about it now because it’s like £8, £8.60 or something for a tube of cream that doesn’t really make much difference to my life so I just don’t bother.

So in that situation would you sort of think well I’m already using moisturiser, it’s not an £8 thing to fork out in one go type of thing?

Yeh for me I'd rather just use something that I can buy a bit cheaper. I mean like my friend with it really bad on her hands, she has to fork out a lot more money to control it because it is something that impacts on her so much but I’m a bit of a cheapskate so I don’t, I just use Vaseline [laughs].

Alice has had eczema since she was little and hasn’t looked online about it.

I guess the only things that I’ve kind of learnt about it have been from my own experience and knowing how I deal with it. I honestly, I’ve never gone out of my way to Google eczema and find out what it is and, I’m not really sure why actually now, I suppose it’s because I’ve had it for so long that I don’t think about it anymore and now it’s actually easy to go and Google all the information – I just haven’t. But yeh it’s mainly just things like moisturising and the antihistamines and whatever that I know make a difference but yeh.