Ok, this is probably going to sound a lot like an advert for a product here, and in a way, I suppose it is. Feel free to read along, or not.

As some of you know, I suffer from ecxema. My hands are covered with it (and often are dry, scaly, itchy, cracked and bleeding) and my right elbow is normally an awful, scaly, itchy mass of disgustingness.

Several weeks ago, I was directed toward a place that was offering free samples of their product, Skin MD Natural Shielding Lotion, to bloggers. We were to use the product then write an honest review of it in our blogs. Well, having tried everything else under the sun (and some things under the moon, too) I figured it couldn't hurt and I requested a sample. Just a few short days later, a small package arrived on my front porch. Let me say that I was expecting a sample. You know, a handful of those little foil packets that you open and after the first use, it dries out and you can't use it anymore. Well, there were some of those in there, but there was also a 4 fl. oz. bottle of the stuff. I was already pleasantly surprised.

I quickly scanned the back of the bottle and it said to use a small amount of the lotion initially every 2-8 hours until moisture level in skin improves and then every 12 to 24 hours after that. I immediately started out by squirting a big gob on the back of my hand and rubbing it in. I had dispensed enough for both hands and both of my elbows. They are right--a little goes a long way! I admit to being skeptical about the lotion as I was rubbing it into my hands. It is very thin and I didn't think that something that insubstantial could possibly work. It absorbs very quickly and is not greasy at all.

After a few days of use, I started to notice a little bit of a white residue on my hands a few minutes after applying the lotion, but after a few more days, that went away. After a couple of weeks of using the lotion, my hands had completely stopped itching and they were no longer cracked and bleeding. Another week or so and most of the redness was gone, too and my hands looked almost normal for the first time in literally years. I have continued to use the lotion twice a day (except for an experiment that I am still regretting and will mention later).

Now, my elbow has been another story. It was really bad. I mean really bad. So bad that children and many adults shied away from it and even my MD was slightly grossed out by it. I have used the lotion on my elbow just as religiously as on my hands but for a long time I noticed no changes.

After several weeks, finally the redness started going away on my elbow. The next thing that happened was that some of the larger scaley areas were going away and now, many weeks into using the lotion, the elbow now just looks extremely dry. It is slowly getting better, like I mentioned earlier, it was really bad. I used Eucerin, Cetaphil, olive oil, vitamin E, sweet almond oil, jojoba, shea and cocoa butters, Jergins Extra Dry Skin lotion and I don't know how many other things and none of them have even come close to doing what this lotion has done for my elbow (or my hands either). I am sold on this stuff and I am looking forward to the time when my elbow looks as good as my hands do. I am confident that it will get there eventually. My only regret is that I did not take before photos to show what my skin looked like before.

Ok, now for my experiment. I stopped using the lotion on my hands for about 3 days because the weather had warmed up some and I wanted to see what would happen. Well, I found out. The ecxema returned even worse than it had been before. My hands itched so bad I couldn't help scratching them, and unfortunately scratched them raw in a few places. My knuckles split and bled and the backs of my hands cracked open and bled in many places. I have been using the lotion again for a few days now and the itchiness is gone, but the extreme dryness is still there. I know it will take about another week for that to clear up again. And then a few days more for all the scabs to go away again.

I forgot to mention that the scent of this lotion is very light, almost not detectable by my allergy-ridden nose, but it is not a girly scent at all.

http://www.skinmdnatural.com/

My goofy kid

Here is an updated photo of my son. He will be 10 in July. His hair has been trimmed, but not cut since he was 5 years old. It comes down past his waist now. I'm telling you, nothing gets a mother yelled at quite as much as having a long-haired son. :-)

Life is like a cliffhanger...

It's not that I stopped posting, just that I posted a bunch of stuff and then went back through and deleted all the posts. I left a few, but they are all older. Since I posted last, I finished my AA degree. Yay! I also enrolled in a local University which I have come to regret having done. I will have to explain that some other time. I am going to post a link here for anyone who cares. It's to my other blog. My "real" blog, where I have friends and other blogs that I subscribe to, I put all of my "serious" postings there now and I update it fairly regularly. Over there you can read the entries on my friends page and find out just how whacked I really am. :-) (Trust me, I'm pretty strange!)

loraca.livejournal.com should get you there. Be warned, I am a Pagan and so are most of my friends, so some of the content of my own posts there and the posts of my friends may be offensive to some people. If you are not one of those people, then please feel free to check it out.

Here is some stuff that I wrote in another blog posting that was closed to everyone but my friends. I wanted to post it here, too, though.

I am uncertain what to write. I had many thoughts a few minutes ago, but now I am drawing a blank. For anyone who doesn’t know and who actually cares, I am a student at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. I am technically a junior there, but there are some mix-ups with my transcripts, so the admissions office claims that I am only a sophomore. They are smokin’ crack in the bus station bathroom is what they are doing. I probably will not be returning to UMKC in the fall because of all the problems I have had with them. First the admissions problems, and then the financial aid office took away more than half my FA, making me owe the school over a thousand dollars now. Over a thousand dollars that I do not have.

If I had that much money laying around, I could afford to turn the furnace up to a decent temperature and not be sitting here right now with finger and toenail beds that are purple because I am so cold. If I had that much money laying around, maybe I could afford to buy a crappy car so that I could go places and do things while my husband is at work and school.

I was actually accepted at Tulane university and given a $25,000 scholarship there, which I stupidly turned down. I decided that I didn’t want to uproot my 9-year-old son again and move him down to New Orleans while I finished my degree. Now, part of me wishes that I would have done that. Tulane is an excellent school to be graduated from. And, had I done that, the last 5 months of my life would have turned out MUCH different. Better? I don’t know about that, but I do know that my life would be different right now. Want to know why?

Sorry, you will have to wait for the next great installment of...

loraca’s great cliffhanger!