Over the last 18 months, there has been an ever worsening skin condition. Among the things that have gotten worse is my ability to adequatly describe the collective condition; it keeps morphing and changing so much that it nearly defies a consise description being put to it. Making matters worse, I suspect that this condition is in part related by other conditions/circumstances that go at least as far back as 28 years... again, it's so hard to get a handle on what has recently been going on that it has then become difficult to figure out when I should consider past circumstances as possibly being related, or not.

The quickest run down that I can think of for now:

28 years ago I incurred very bad sunburn on the tops of my otherwise lilly-white feet, this while having spent 3 days on the sandy shores of Ocracoke Island. By the time this mini vacation was ended and I returned back to the city to head back to school, both feet had become swollen and badly blistered. When I came home from the first day back at school, upon removing the shoes there also came off/out a literal bucket full of lymph fluid that had drained into the shoes during the day. FYI, the left foot seemed to have gotten a little more badly burned than the right and therefore was a bit more enflamed for these troubles. Day two I awoke to what I diagonosed as poison ivy, not just on top of the already badly enflamed & oozing sunbrun skin on the left foot, but also on face, up nostrils, into corners of eyes and mouth; a literal walking freak. Day two saw me skip classes in order to hunt down a local physician. One was found within short range. Physician prescribed two things: a powder (something like modern-day "oatmeal bath") that he advised would dry up the oozing condition; a packet of pills. I now forget the order of taking these pills, it was either 3 the first day, 5 the second, 7 the third, and on like this until all gone, or the reverse of this. I also forget what, exactly, these pills were made of. I suspect they were a type of hormonal prescription. I do know this, the foot dried up and the rash (whether or not it was poison) cleared within 48 hours. At that time, so I thought, all was well and I went back to school while this all became a fading memory.

Subsequent to that, about a year or two later a small patch of intensely itchy rash appeared on top of the left foot only, a patch about the size of a half-dollar. Other than scratching and wondering "gee, what is that,where did it come from?" for about 2 days, I did nothing else. Whatever is was, whyever it was, it seemed to go away within a day or two, seeming to go just as mysteriously as it had come. For the next twenty-plus years, this rather odd routine would repeat about once every year or two. Some years it didn't happen, some years it did. During the same twenty-plus years, I did not have one single bout, not a lick, of poison ivy. Prior to that sunburn event, from the time I was a toddler, I'd always had sensitivity to poison ivy so bad that I literally would get a bad rash at times seemingly from it "blowing in the wind". Since I then spent 20-plus years without a single poinson ivy event, this further lends credance to those pills having been some sort of "immunity building" hormonal treatment.

This then is how the collective situation was as of early Spring 2006, when "the mystery patch" returned to the left foot pretty much the same way it has been intermittently appearing the past 20-plus years. However, something was different, except, at that time in spring 06', I did not yet know that something different was going on. FWIW, by the sprign of 06', I had successfully had all Amalgams removed from inside my head/jaw (14). During the summer and fall months of 06', I also had all the root-canaled teeth extracted (4, molars each).

Anyway, spring of 06', this apparent mystery patch appeared. However, it did not go away within a day or two like it always had prior. Instead, it just hung around, being itchy and rashy. It did not spread. It did not weep nor ooze, it did not change colors, it basically just stayed the same - a plain, mostly flesh-colored rash that itched intensely off and on. By the time it got to be later summer, I decided to begin trying / experimenting with self-treatment. The first thing I tried was applying some B&W salve. This appeared to lessen the rash, but it did not go away, it did not get worse, but within a few days it returned to the condition it had been - an intensely itchy rash. Then I tried a Doc John Christopher simple fomentation of Black-Walnut Tincture. Within a day or two, the rash had nearly doubled in size, so I put away this particular experiment and left it alone for the next few months. For these few monts, it stopped spreading, and was pretty much the same as it had always been EXCEPT that the patch had nearly doubled in size after I applied 2 days of Black-Walnut Tincture Fomentation.

This got me into early 07', the same period when the original Iodine support forum sprang up. By March or so, I began experimenting with painting the foot/rash wtih Lugol's. I took a conservative approach at first, but within a day or two, I lost grip with being conservative and began painting heavily. I had posted this, with pictures, but I believe most of those lengthy posts got lost in last year's CureZone meltdown. Within a week, my foot had become quite swollen, the rash was burst open and oozing something, lymph drainage, infection drainage, something. It was at this point that I stopped experimentation with external painting with Lugol's. By this time the rash portion of this condition had spread past the ankle and had gone part way up the shin and was also wrapping partly around the calf, but the worst of the inflamation was happening on top of the foot. Through the help of a few other CureZone posters, I was led to try a Slippery Elm poultice. This provided immediate relief, and after 3 days of using this poultace, the foot, which had been swollen nearly 3 times normal size, was back down to normal size. The rash was stil there, but it was no longer in one continuous patch. Instead the rash was now made up of many small patches intermittently spread across entire length of the top of foot, ankles, and roughly half way up the shin and around the calf. Here and there, there was still a bit of oozing going on - teardrop like weeping, but not nearly as bad as prior to the Slipprey Elm poultace.

For the next few weeks, this conidtion stayed pretty much as is: a bunch of isolated tiny patches of rashy itch all over foort, ankle, shin and calf BUT it was back into the mode of no longer spreading, and only a bit of weeping going on. The patches of rash were still intensely itchy. I then began soaking in an otameal bath in very hot water. I found this hot water provided an odd euphoric itch relief that would last for many hours. This is, the itch relief would last for up to 12 hours. The bizarro euphoria lasted only about 10 seconds.

After watching this condition stay put for a few weeks, I then became annoyed enought that it wasnt' going away completely to try something else. There had been a tube of ointment in the medicine cabinet that had been prescribed to me roughly 5 years ago, a big tube that I hardly ever used, stuff caled Triamcinolone Acetonide Cream USP, the latter being (apparently) the prominent active ingredient, but the label lists many ingredients, most derivatives of refined chemicals, and im pretty sure this cream is a cortizone / hormonal-type treatment. Just one of the baffling aspets to all of this is, after an experimetnal dab of this cream, I noticed the area dabbed cleared -the itch/patch/rash cleared. I then applied the cream more broadly. Within 4 days, all the external blemishes, all the itch, all the rash, all the weeping - gone! Consistent with what I've read here and there about using such products to treat the collective octopus orthodox calls "eczema", after a few days of stopping the use of this cream, there began to appear very small patches of new itch. However, these patches would occur in places where there previously had been no patch, and they appeared much smaller than the patches that had previously existed. There was no oozing/weeping with these new patches. Comparatively, I was able to live with this much better than what I had previously been dealing with. So, off and on since March 07', I've been dabbing a bit of this cream onto new patches that appear now and then, otherwise, my skin world was doing okay.

Meanwhile, there is what I believed to be a separate skin condition that's been manifesting on a pea-sized section of calf on left leg for about 4 years. When this appeared 4 years ago, most of the above condition was still in the future...so I was dumb/ignorant...blissful, for the time being, so to speak. This pea sized itchy patch did not appear as a rash, it appeared as a small nub, kind of scaley...like a small patch of "dry skin" people are said to get. For the better part of the past 4 years, this little nub of seemingly isolated itchy patch did not spread, did not worsen, and sometimes it would go away seemingly all on it's own for days, weeks and months at a time, only to return and manifest the same way it had before. All I ever did to it was scratch it, and wonder about it.

About a month ago, this pea-sized scale-like nub of a patch returned to the middle of my left calf. For a few days I scratched it. Then one day it began to ooze, and after oozing, it left a brownish, crusty dried cake of something. To me, this looked like a dead ringer for Impetigo. To my surprise, I recently was given the book The People's Medical Advisor, originaly printed in the late 1800s, the version I was given was printed in 1908. In that book, Dr. Pierce describes a connection between classic Impetigo and several of the other stages / phases of conditions loosley lumped together (at least during that era) as "eczema"....strange, thought I. Anyway, upon seeing this new change in the condition on the calf and with it's new condition appearing as what i recognize a stage of worsening Impetigo, I cautiously began treating with a small, localized fomentation of Black-Walnut Tincture. I was cautious in part because it was this very same treatment that seemed to set me on the downward spiral that started with a different kind of itchy rashy patch once contained to the top of left foot. Nonetheless, I applied this fomentation as Doc John explained, to include a plastic cover to hold in moisture.... and yes, it did concern me that this plastic cover may have been providing the necessary "fomentation" for other things I was not aware of to take better root, and spread.......but I did this nonetheless. Guess what? Within 3 days, the oozing, crusty stuff that looked like impetigo stopped oozing, stopped crusting (yay me!), but promptly morphed into the same kind of itchy rashy outbreak that has been constatnly afficting my left foot/ankle/shin/calf for close to a year now :( (boo me).

This is pretty much the total summary up to the present day of the collective, befuddling, ever-worsenting skin condition impacting my left leg below the knee. At this point, I'm convinced that I'm not up against just one thing, but instead there are multiple things / conditions present, and no sooner do I have success treating one, and this only leads to another becoming more prominent. I'm pretty sure there are at least two separate conditions going on here, and suspect there may be 3 or 4 or more other conditions also involved which I do not know, for sure, but can only guess at.

Starting last Sunday at 11 PM, I began a 3 day juice fast. Technically, this turned into a 3.5 day fast because I was very cautious and conservative about breaking the fast and did not put anything into my stomach even loosley under the guise of "solid food" until late Thursday afternoon. During that time, the specific patch on the back of my calf improved, but has now morphed into a different condition. What condition? I dunno, call it excema, call it skin cancer, call it dermatitis, call it whateve might make you feel better, but it is not the same pea-sized nub of a itchy patch condition I began treating just a week or so ago. I've been doing very well on the diet front since conluding the juice fast...it is amazing how much a 3 day fast adjusts one's routine appetite for eating "food". That's the good news. The bad news is, I've now got well over 9 months invested with trying to treat a worsening condition that started with a small patch on left foot but has now gradualy expanded and morphed into a condition covering most of the ankle, shin and calf. Just this morning I took a quick shower, used some home made olive oil soap to lightly wash the affected leg/shin/calf, and for my troubles, I now have a new, broad patch of oozing and crusting stuff on the inside of calf completely below and removed from the area of that once pea-sized nub..........(shrug).