⌂ After Years of Itching, I Demanded a Genuine Cure
On diagnosing ourselves when doctors won't take us seriously
Welcome to the many new subscribers who came from last week’s essay. People apparently love uplifting ideas!
I’m Claire Polders, a Dutch author and nomad. I write weekly essays about my nomadic life and the world I encounter.
You can expect deep dives into the transformative power of art and the discomfort of visiting the past, travelogues about food, living sustainably, and finding beauty in unexpected places.
Occasionally, I’ll talk about the challenges of being a writer or share personal essays on other subjects as I am doing today. You can find out more about this publication on my about page or read my origin story on how I became a nomad.
Below is a short personal essay on my experiences with French doctors. The French healthcare system gets a lot of things right: Care is affordable, available to all, and usually of high quality. But in my case, I had to take matters into my own hands.
After Years of Itching, I Demanded a Genuine Cure
My French dentist paused midway through her yearly cleaning of my teeth, her gloved fingers in my mouth, and expressed her frowning concern, not about my gums, but about my throat, which was swollen, scratched, and covered in flaming red patches.
My French dermatologist smiled at me agreeably when I told her the steroid creams she had prescribed a year ago weren’t healing me. They treated the symptoms instead of the cause and they thinned my skin. She replied that the chronic condition I’d suffered from since childhood was now worsening with age and offered to prescribe me stronger creams. I burst into tears, exasperated from years of itching, I demanded a genuine cure. She asked me whether I had any friends.
My immune system was overreacting, which meant I was overreacting.
Two general practitioners in Paris recommended a daily dose of antihistamines and psyllium seeds. My immune system was overreacting, which meant I was overreacting.
For years, my American husband lovingly called me Michael Jackson when I slid on my white cotton gloves at night so I wouldn’t mangle myself during sleep. Despite the gloves, I would wake up in the morning between bloodied sheets.
I cut out wine, dust, dairy, shampoo, scented toilet seat cleaner, and evenings out with friends. I failed to cut out failure: I did not find a cause.
One day, I requested minuscule portions of fish and seafood on the biweekly market in our arrondissement, explaining to the mustached fishmonger from Brittany why I needed a sliver of salmon, a sliver of bass, one shrimp, one scallop, and one mussel. After he understood that my French allergist meant to inject pieces of seafood into my skin, the fishmonger insisted on handing me everything I needed for free.
How dogged I was. In the end, I ate nothing but rice, sweet potatoes, lettuce, and olive oil, undernourishing myself rather than eating the wrong thing. Being around me became such fun!
I can still feel the endless itching, the pain of cracked skin, my eyes tearing from inflamed lids.
The cure of absence traveled up my body as the year went by…
The problem couldn’t be gluten, the choir of my French doctors sang, because an intolerance to gluten would give me a different type of dermatitis and would cause diarrhea, not constipation. Have you tried drinking more water? Eating more fiber? Swallowing more despair? I silently raged and secretly kept avoiding gluten, because I was dogged and had a hunch, because I sensed that my body was healing even though the evidence had yet to come.
After three months of not eating gluten, my skin began to recover. The eczema disappeared first from my ankles, then the back of my knees, my thighs, my buttocks, my stomach, my breasts, my elbows, my shoulders, my throat. The cure of absence traveled up my body as the year went by, until I was left with only two red patches on my jaws that still come and go depending on my diet, the climate, my stress level, the toxicity of my shampoo, and the proximity of healing salt waters. These patches are my badges of honor, proof of my near and therefore total victory.
Disclaimer
This post is a reflection of my personal experiences in Paris in 2008 and beyond. It’s not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Please consult a qualified healthcare professional for your specific needs first. If they don’t take your problems seriously, you could consider finding alternative solutions on your own.
This essay was previously published by Gargoyle Magazine as “Michael Jackson at Night.” Thank you, Richard Peabody!
Desk Journeys aka Reading Recommendations
I just finished Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch (Riverhead Books, 2025), an excellent lyrical memoir in which the author dips into the speculative to reframe her memories.
"I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions."
Just as in her stunning debut, The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books, 2011), Yuknavitch uses water as a leitmotif, dipping us into pools of grief and carrying us along currents of rehabilitation and love.
If writing trauma is a subject that interests you, I can also highly recommend Body Work by Melissa Febos (Catapult, 2022), a craft book with elements of memoir, and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk (Penguin Books, 2015). In this last book, a medical specialist explains how trauma literally changes our bodies and what we can do to minimize the damage. Reading it brought me closer to family members and friends, allowing me to see how their past experiences kept influencing their current lives.
Related Posts
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Time to Say Goodbye
Daniel and I just arrived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. We love the gorgeous city, the light, the food, our temporary home, and our housemate Dulce (aka the cat), but we unfortunately neighbor a house under construction. Sound pollution can apparently not be avoided. Will we be able to adapt to this circumstance? Last week, I prided us on being flexible, so we’re going to try to make this work by writing in the public library or in one of the many cafes.
All my best,
Claire
P.S. Do you have a medical story you’d like to share? A self-diagnosis? Please tell me about it in the comments.
Claire, after receiving the Moderna COVID booster in late 2021, red lesions popped up on my torso. I was plagued with constant itching. My primary didn't know what it was, and since it was Christmas time, I couldn't get an appointment with a dermatologist until January. The dermatologist immediately recognized it but wanted a biopsy to confirm it: bullous pemphigus vulgaris, a rare and incurable (but treatable) autoimmune disease. The Rx? 100 mg of prednisone daily. I'm just recovering from the second bout that has kept me housebound since September. The prednisone blew up my body, rendering me immobile. It's been a wild ride. I found comfort in writing in response to art from the Musee d'Orsay and the Rijksmuseum, both of which I visited a year ago.
I'm glad you found relief!
Enjoyed meeting you last evening. I’ve had fiction published in Gargoyle. And by the Fiction Collective 2, who published Lidia Yuknavitch a long time ago. Do you have a novel in English. I’d love to trade books.