Living with Petroleum Allergies in a Chemical World: It Is Always Darkest Before the Dawn

By Steven Neil

Unemployed and told that my rash was non-work related, I was desperate to find both a new job and an answer to my condition.

It took about three weeks, but I did land a temporary to perm job working in another warehouse. It was a good job, I liked the people and the position, and I hoped I could get hired on there. My rash, however, had other ideas. Every day I went to work, the rash grew a little more, got a little more painful, and began to spread down my neck and onto my wrists. After a week of increasing symptoms, I knew I needed to see a dermatologist, but not the one I had visited before, so I scheduled an appointment with a different doctor.

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When I went in to see the new doctor, she came over and inspected my scalp and commented: “you know, you don’t have dandruff.” To which I said: “yes, I know that, and I tried to tell that to the other doctor.” Then she said that there was no way I had Seborrheic Dermatitis, but I did have contact dermatitis, most likely caused by chemicals at work. She told me to stop all the medicines I was taking and prescribed another round of Prednisone.

Prednisone can be an amazing medicine when used on contact dermatitis because it often enables the body’s defense mechanisms to overcome the problem. But anyone taking Prednisone should be aware that it has numerous and possibly quite severe side effects. It certainly did on me as it affected my blood pressure, gave me headaches, blurred my vision, and dried out my skin. While it did help the rash on my neck, face, and wrist recede as long as I was taking more than 30 milligrams a day, it could not overcome the constant exposure to allergens I experienced at work. Once the dosage went below the 30mg, the symptoms would come back. Within two weeks, I was back at her office and nearly as broken out as I was before.

My doctor ordered a patch test for me as the next step in the process of determining what was going on with me. She advised me to continue to use any moisturizing crème that didn’t burn too badly but made no other suggestions nor prescribed other medicines to ease my suffering. I lasted three days before I could no longer physically do my job. By this time, the rash was covering most of my neck, ears, forearms, face, and forehead. My right eye was completely swollen shut, and my blood pressure was spiking dangerously high.

So, following work on a Friday, I went to the Emergency Room. The doctor I saw was shocked at my condition and prescribed a week off from work. She was the first person to have given me a practical solution to help my disorder; she had me start taking antihistamines at night and in the morning to start calming down my immune system.

Is There a Real Doctor in the House?

Once again, I could not believe that another dermatologist had failed me, the first one I went to completely misdiagnosed me while the second did not offer any solutions for my problems while I waited for my patch test. Since they had both worked at the same clinic, I decided it was time to find a different clinic, so I made an appointment with a third dermatologist.

A Temporary Reprieve

Though the antihistamines would help and still do, they could not overcome the allergen overload I experienced at work. While my conditions slightly improved during my week off, the antihistamines proved to be insufficient to stop the crisis I was going to experience when I returned to work the following week.

By the time I returned to work, the swelling had gone down in my right eye, and my rash had receded slightly. It was to be the worst workday of my life. Within the first hour, my face, neck, and forearms felt like they were on fire and turning purple. I had to use one of my hands to prop my right eye open enough to see, and even then, my vision blurred. I had a fever and was hot to the touch, and my body felt like it was ready to explode. By the time I left work, I could barely function.

I made it home that night and applied ice pack after ice pack to my face, neck, and arms; with little effect, I could not ease the burning. By bed-time, I had a severe headache, itched uncontrollably, and I could not cool down. It was time to go back to the Emergency Room and doing so saved my life.

Once I was admitted into the hospital, a nurse took my blood pressure twice since she could not believe the first reading; it was 197 over 109, high enough that a stroke was a real possibility. The doctor I saw told me to see my doctor the next day to deal with the blood pressure issue and took me off of work until my new dermatologist could offer me some solutions to my problems. Little did I know that may well have been the last day I will have worked outside of my house. Three days later, I went in for my patch test, which would begin to reveal how extensive my allergies are, and with that revelation would come the first ray of hope I had found for it began to clarify the issues so I could begin to find solutions.

I will end my narrative here since this truly was the point at which my rash and symptoms were at their worst. I had no idea what was causing it, nor if it would ever get better, truly the darkest moment before the dawn.

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