Thursday, December 3, 2015

Contact Dermatitis

For over a week I've been doing my best to not scratch an itch... or many itches. Sometimes I just can't help it, and have indulged in episodes of frantic scratching, leaving my skin rough, red, and a little broken up. Meanwhile, I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what I've been exposed to that has started this episode of contact dermatitis.
Was it the new shampoo or the olive oil soap I'd tried? My beloved wool shirts, socks, and jackets? Something I ate? Something in the water?

Rash on my arm next
 to the new uniform.
Then as I was hanging my husband's new uniform on my indoor clothes line, a label caught my attention, and gave me another suspect to consider. Had I washed my clothes with these insecticide laced uniforms? Generally, I don't separate his uniforms from the rest of the laundry, but I will now.

Honestly, my husband isn't trekking through mosquito infested jungles. Lacing Permethrin into his uniform worn in an office building environment seems ridiculous. This is one instance where I feel a class A uniform would be much better suited for what he's actually doing.  Fighting beltway traffic, and preparing morning briefs at 0-dark hundred does not require protection from disease carrying insects! And I don't need these chemicals seeping into my household environment neither.

The label also stated, and I hope this is true, that dry cleaning will remove the chemicals. So I've asked him to dry clean them. I have no way to testing this for sure, and don't care to subject myself to a trial for science sake. I just want whatever I'm reacting to gone... along with the itching to stop. So the olive oil soap, new shampoo are gone. And I'm giving wool shirts and coats a rest too, though the socks don't seem to be the problem, so I'm thinking perhaps my wool shirts are just adding salt to the already inflamed skin and might not actually be the cause... and they're not new... so that decreases my suspicion of a wool allergy.

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