I’ll start at the beginning because starting at the end is just plain dumb. When I was in high school, specifically the first 3 years of high school, I never had spots even though quite a few of my friends did. I was the tallest skinniest kid in school with skin so fair it looked like I’d never seen daylight and hair so ginger even the other ginger kids called me names.
It was not the best start to one of the toughest times of life for your average teenage boy. I used to actually wonder why these other kids suddenly got spots and thought it was horrible but then it was summer holidays and BANG! I instantly have more spots than the rest of my classmates combined and I have to start the new school year looking like I’d been set on fire and someone had put the fire out using only a screwdriver.
I even remember the first day I figured out that you could actually squeeze spots…it actually stung a bit sometimes but in a weird way it was actually satisfying (if only I could turn back the clock) but too much squeezing is a terrible thing and it got worse and worse eventually causing a few scars.
Anyways….parents….there’s something every teenager needs, mine were as annoying as ever, my father assumed that because my nose was red all the time (mostly caused by the amount of squeezing) I must actually be sniffing glue - yes I was actually accused of this.
My mother on the other hand insisted that hydrogen peroxide dripped onto cotton-buds and dabbed directly onto spots would cure the problem. Because as we all know if you have an open wound its best to rub acid directly into it! But this is the point where ‘miracle cures!’ and ‘anything please anything’ was all I would think about so I went along with what my parents said and of course it just made things worse.
This is where you would see some kind of music-backed montage of clips, if this was a movie, because as with most badly told stories I’m going to jump ahead about 5 years. By now I have terrible acne across my back which I spend far too much time squeezing and I’ve spent so many years squeezing spots on my face I have a permanently red bulbous nose and the rest of my face isn’t too good either.
As with most people like this I never take my shirt off, I wouldn’t swim, I don’t have great relationships as I’m uncomfortable with people seeing me naked, oh and I’m still ginger but some things we do eventually learn to live with.
For some reason I even find talking about my acne a problem so its years before I think about seeing a doctor about it so in the mean time I try a whole series of different soaps and cleansers but nothing makes a difference.
I even try changing diet, this I’ve always had different opinions on, and most people will tell you that diet does not in anyway change your skin but I think that isn’t true. We’ve all seen the ‘honey were killing our family’ and ‘diet vets’ and ‘Gillian Mckieths toilet shop’…the list is endless…TV programs about changing your diet and losing weight - one common thing in these programs is that people are fat but then get a little bit thinner and people have bad skin which then gets better.
A healthy diet does seriously help, eating greasy food isn’t going to give you spots but eating nothing but greasy food is no doubt going to give you bad skin. I do realise that some people react to different foods though, I love milk but milk totally hates me with a vengeance and will make my stomach cry, in the same way my best friend (who has good skin) can eat anything but one bit of chocolate gives him a rash so I thinks its best to find a healthy balance of food and keep changing it, give your body new things all the time, but that’s just me - eat whatever you are comfortable with.
Back to my tale…..I even try home herbal remedies and vitamins etc but nothing makes the slightest change. Eventually when I’m about 24 I actually go to see the doctor as it had now been 10 years of my life with this pain. It was actually at this point that I realised what probably made me feel the worst about acne.
If you have some kind of facial disfigurement or a heavy scar or random patches of hair or teeth that look like they are trying to escape from your face - people will look at you and for the most part will just think nothing. I have plenty of friends that I don’t think make the most attractive people and one guy who lives near me and goes to some of the same bars as me (which always results in us saying hello) to put it simply actually looks like a minor elephant man but I can hold a conversation with all of them and I can look them in the face and think nothing because they are the way they are.
But to look at someone with a terrible skin condition makes most people think, myself included, ‘you are a totally normal looking person, if only you’d could clean your face because I wouldn’t want to have to touch you’. It was a horrible thought for me and would make me feel quite low at times so for those out there who suffer from depression I can understand how no matter what anyone tells you…nothing but a cure will make you feel happier because thoughts like that will always stick in your mind.
So I’m at the doctors and she gives me many creams, ointments, topics, sprays, antibiotics and I try them all and over time I realise that creams, ointments and topics just make my skin sore and a lot worse even if I stay the course…fair skin hates most creams, I don’t even use moisturisers as my skin is softer than the fabulous Mr Soft of Trebor Softmint fame.
Nothing works but by now I was willing to trying rubbing marmite on my face if I’d thought it would help. I hate marmite. The Dot Com Bubble, The Interweb, Cyberspace!!!! Even though it absorbs your free time like a dry sponge and for some reason makes everyone find dancing rodents funny…the Internet is a wonderful tool and I eventually turned to the WonderWeb for ideas and help.
After a long nights search I stumbled across a page about Roaccutane. I was down the doctors faster than lightning begging to be given the new Wonder-Drug…but hold on! this is the UK and the NHS so you have to follow the rules and see a dermatologist which will take a few months for an appointment.
So I wait. And I wait. Then I have to try some further treatments first before the Dermatologist will let me use Roaccutane (I agree to this but don’t use any of it as I was so set on just having Roaccutane so I lie to the Doc that the treatment never worked) so I spend my time online sending emails to other Roaccutane users about possible side effects.
Drugs have side effects (or is it affects? I always get them confused), I swear I had a drug for a bout of tonsillitis I had this year that listed every possible outcome in life including ‘you may win the lottery’ and ‘In your second life you will only be allowed to take the form of an insect’.
People Have allergic reactions to just about everything like hay fever (it doesn’t matter what you say to me…hay fever is an allergy to the earth…it’s made mostly of plants and you are allergic to them…it baffles me).
So keeping that in mind it is obvious people will have random reactions to roaccutane but there are some that nearly everybody will have;
1. Simply by the way this drug works it will dry your skin out causing your lips to become very dry, a good lip salve or Vaseline will help for this but I simply left it as it was…I even once had a woman stop me on Oxford St in London and ask me about roaccutane simply because my lips were ‘a giveway’.
2. It will make your acne worse. For the first month or so of having Roaccutane it gets so much worse than it already is, I put this down to my body fighting back as if the drug was trying to make the acne stop but my body was trying its best to make it continue and it tried harder and harder until eventually the drug won and my body gave up. I’m sure it’s far more scientific and technical than that but it’s basically something along those lines. The time period of the ‘gettingworsebeforeitgetsbetter’ is different for everybody, for some it’s short, for some its ages (for me it was ages).
3. Depression. This is the hardest one, and some people will hate me for saying so but I don’t believe roaccutane causes this. Acne causes depression and we all know it, no one as of yet has woken up and thought ‘YES! I have acne…I cant wait to show everyone!’, the problem is Roaccutane can sound like the all miracle cure but like all things in life it doesn’t work for the odd few.
A good example of this is local anaesthetic, it in some way stops the nerve responses and allows for doctors to perform normally painful procedures with no discomfort but for 1 in every 10 bajillion of us it is as affective as a needle full of water and of all dumb luck I happen to be one of these people. Even if you do respond to roaccutane the whole ‘gettingworsebeforeitgetsbetter’ stage is too hard for some people to handle and pushes their depression to the limit and some start to think that the miracle cure isn’t going to work so all hope is lost.
People have such bad responses and reactions and it has led to suicide in severe cases but its the risk we all take with any drug, for if you’ve never had penicillin you never know if its going to kill you or not. It’s up to you to accept the risk and if you have a good dermatologist you should be eased onto the drug at a slow pace and monitored carefully.
So anyway, I did my course, being the extremely tall person I am I was given an extremely large dose over a very long period of time. My back cleared up and has never since broken out in anything other than the random spot that everyone ever gets. My face cleared and after the drying out settled down the spots went and have never had to squeeze a spot or worry about looking for them since. That was all of 4 years ago, but it wasn’t the end for me.
A lifetime of squeezing spots left me with an ultra bright red nose covered in bright red thread veins at the surface, I actually felt as bad about this as I did about the acne. Strangely I had the opposite to a common side effect of the drug in that rather than lose hair I kept getting more but really this is just a man getting older..
I always was a hairy beast but my hair got a bit thicker and harsher than it was before so with my delicate fair skin it led to beard rash all the time, so yes I sometimes look like I’ve got a few spots but they are never the ‘whitehead’ or puss filled spots and I rarely get a blackhead…its just a rash from my rough hair.
But the last outcome was that where as a hair follicle on my nose could have filed with ‘sebum’ or the typical ooze that forms puss or whatever you call it now actually fills the same way as a blackhead but its actually white….its very weird and hard to describe but a good clean keeps this ok. So after a good waxing and taking care to treat my beard to a good soak I’m only left with my vein filled nose so I decided to get that fixed too.
I turns out the first option is sclerotherapy which is an ultra fine needle injected directly into the veins with a chemical which dissolves the structure of the veins. I went all the way to posh cosmetic heaven at Harley Street and paid top-dollar to have this done. Imagine having the pure liquid gas of the sun injected into your face….that kind of thing would be nice and pleasant compared to sclerotherapy…it hurt a lot. After a few treatments just like my reaction to local anaesthetic…absolutely nothing happened, and just like the start of roaccutane it bummed me out big time.
So I moved to laser treatment for thread-vein removal but again this didn’t do anything other than sting a bit but luckily lately I’ve found a great place that really knows what they are doing who use the laser you’d normally use on a leg vein and take it slow and steady and now I’m a few treatments away from no visible veins (it still hurts getting it done but I can cope with that). I will still have a red nose that with my fair skin shows up in photos quite a lot but after 17 years of having acne I feel like I’m reaching the end of it all. Along the way I’ve tried many things and spoken to many different people and when randomly looking for a link about roaccutane to send to a colleague I found this page so I just thought I’d tell you the rough points of my story. if in any way I can help anyone else considering or even taking this treatment or even those who don’t want to but might have questions please do leave a comment below, I’m more than happy to answer any questions or give advice as best I can in the same way that others helped me when I was looking online.
