This site has been fantastically useful to me, especially during the first few weeks on Roaccutane so I thought I would take some time to give back!
I’ve put in the spiel of all my history and experiences but if you just want to get to the photos they’re down the bottom.
I started noticing my acne when I was about 15/16 but I suppose I have had it since about 14 with it getting progressively worse. It had never been particularly bad on my face but my neck, chest, shoulders and back were awful. I hadn’t done anything about it until I was 17 when my mum suggested I go to the doctors which I thought was a ridiculous idea; people don’t go to the doctors because they have spots, do they? Anyhow, I went and they prescribed me a 4 month course of tetracycline which did precisely nothing. I sort of gave up for a while after that and forgot about it, all the while my skin getting worse but I went back about a year later in my first year at uni. I was prescribed another antibiotic type-treatment as well as a Benzoyl Peroxide gel to apply to my face, which I used fanatically to the extent that my whole face dried up and was bright red for about 3 days. I stopped using the gel after that! Sometime after my antibiotics were exhausted my mum reminded me that an old neighbour of ours who had moved round the corner happened to be a (thankfully, NHS) consultant dermatologist and had already agreed to see me; my mum having taken it upon herself to be my personal skin secretary. Having had a look at my face and back one evening then, the consultant decided that I would have another course of an antibiotic and failing that she would consider putting me on Roaccutane. I had a pamphlet to read which detailed all the gruesome side effects but after having a read around it I decided that this was the drug for me. The antibiotics rather predictably failed and I was back again 3 months later (this time in the hospital rather than the house round the corner) being weighed and having liver function tests.
So having taken something of a back door into the system I began my first course of Roaccutane just after new year (2008). I weigh just under 70kg and for the first month I was started on 30mg before I was due back to have more blood tests at which point my dose would be upped to 65mg for the remaining 5 months of treatment
The first few days I didn’t really experience anything and I naively thought I would escape the side effects altogether. I was obviously wrong and my skin started becoming more dry after about 5 days so I went off to get a stick of lipsalve which managed to keep most of my lips on my face for a bit longer. I had a bit of a flare up after a week but nothing too drastic. The weirdest thing I noticed is that I could wake up in the morning and not feel completely horrible, I realised that it was because my skin wasn’t greasy and this was what it felt like to be ‘normal’ - apart from all the spots still on my face and back. So it continued for the rest of January until I went back in February for more blood tests and a bigger dose of 65mg.
Having been on 30mg for a month I figured I would have had all the side-effects already but the higher dose really made a difference and as well as my lips, hands and arms dried up a lot. The lipsalve wasn’t cutting it any more so on the recommendation of someone on here I bought a pot of Blistex which I used for the rest of the course and was pretty excellent. For my hands and arms I tried a few different moisturisers including EA 8 hour creme until I finally settled on Nivea Rich Body Moisturiser. The EA stuff was just as good a moisturiser as the Nivea and it didn’t leave your skin feeling like you were greased up ready for a spot of wrestling but I had to conclude that I simply couldn’t afford to spend £20 every 3 weeks or so on moisturiser. Once I’d settled into some sort of moisturising routine the next two or three months passed smoothly with the only incidents being when I’d forget to bring the Blistex out with me and my face would fall off. I did start to get spots on my forearms though which was strange because I’d never had them there before and they looked pretty horrible. The pores across my nose meanwhile had apparently had enough of the blackheads that had lived there pretty much forever and started ejecting them which made my skin really rough (sorry, that sentence was disgusting). I discovered Clean & Clear blackhead clearing scrub which worked a treat and made my skin smooth again.
Over all this time (I’d been on Roaccutane for around 18-20 weeks) I didn’t really notice any improvement in appearance to either my face or my back although the spots on my chest had become much more infrequent and I started to bring the polo shirts back out the cupboard. In the weeks after that (20+) I did notice that my face had only one or two spots at a time and my shoulders had fewer spots but my lower back still had quite a lot but I pressed on despite the side effects getting worse. I had started to get dry eyes which were uncomfortable in the evenings and for about an hour after I woke up but for the rest of the course I never attempted to do anything about it (eyedrops etc). The other thing was I had begun to need a lot more sleep than usual and unless I had 10 hours sleep a night I felt horrendous the next day which is damned inconvenient when you’re in your final semester of uni. However, by far the worst side effect was that I started to feel quite depressed almost all of the time and this feeling never subsided until I finished the Roaccutane. I kept saying to myself, ‘you’re only feeling like this because of the Roaccutane’ but that did next to nothing to ease my mood. Of course I can’t say definitively that this was caused by the Roaccutane because I was under quite a lot of other pressure at the time, but this wasn’t helpful because it didn’t change the way I felt.
In the subsequent weeks my skin gradually improved until there were rarely spots on my face and few anywhere on my back at around week 26. I found it frustrating in the earlier weeks how other people on this site had been clear or seen improvement much earlier on but in the end it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t going to affect the length of the course.
I took my last tablet in July (I had a few days off here and there for various reasons, namely to alleviate the side effects for a few days or the days before and after a particularly ferocious binge drinking session) by which point my skin was as you see it now. I don’t have any new spots and there are no marks on my face but there is still some scarring on my back which hopefully will fade in time. It took about a week for my skin to get back to normal (i.e. where I didn’t have to moisturise daily and apply blistex every other minute) and for my mood to get better. It feels odd now to look back and wonder why I was feeling depressed because there wasn’t really any reason to be as I told myself at the time. The experience has definitely given me a better understanding of what it is to be depressed and for the people who continually suffer from depression I have the utmost sympathy, 12 weeks was bad enough.
So, would I recommend Roaccutane? Yes and no. I now completely understand why other treatments are so much more preferable to doctors because it wreaks absolute havok with your body and other treatments do work for lots of people. For anyone who has not had any treatment for acne then I would not recommend Roaccutane before trying at least two or three other treatments such as antibiotics. For people who feel like they have tried everything, Roaccutane is an excellent last resort because 99 percent of the time it works which for some is all that counts. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it has changed my life but it has definately rid me of the odd day where I wouldn’t see anyone because I hated what was in the mirror, so that is definitely a good thing and I’m glad I did it because of that alone.
That’s my story, maybe it will be useful to somebody so I’ll leave it here because it’s nice to know that other people are going through the same things as you and this site has certainly helped me realise that.
These are the products I ended up using that worked for me: Blistex (all the time), Nivea Rich Body Moisturiser (at night before bed), Head and Shoulders shampoo & conditioner (daily), Clean & Clear blackhead scrub (daily), Dove cream bar (daily).
Here’s the photos: http://www.photobucket.com/myroaccutanephotos
