My angry arms

On itching and clever fishes

I told you I was ill. (Thanks, Spike.) I am one of the few people, probably, who still has up-to-date Covid tests lying around, so I tested several times and was always negative. Even so, I’m sure it was Covid. Certain and convinced. Because it felt like Covid (sledgehammer; overwhelming headaches, post-exertional malaise) and behaved like Covid. And now my skin is on fire.

The week before I began to feel fully better (week 3), I felt briefly better. I got up and felt like myself again, not an ill person. I went to my allotment and got giddy at the idea I was functional again and did four hours of grafting, and two days later I felt crap again. Some of the grafting involved me picking comfrey leaves and putting them in a water barrel to make foul-smelling but excellent comfrey fertilizer. A couple of days later I noticed a rash on my right arm. I don’t get rashes very often, and my skin is robust. I thought, maybe it was the comfrey, and googled, and discovered comfrey has bristles which can cause an allergic reaction. It didn’t make sense though: this was my upper arm and I’d been wearing long sleeves.

Maybe I was suddenly allergic to some detergent? By now my skin was itching all over my body. Not everywhere at once, but over a wide area and randomly. Detergent made sense. I’d scratch and make it worse, and though I have taken anti-histamines daily since I got Long Covid last year, they didn’t help. I had bought some glycerine soap the week before. That went in the bin. I now use Smol laundry capsules and had the biological ones. Maybe I was suddenly reacting to those? I switched to fragrance-free.

And still I itched.

A week later, I had rashes and itch on my inner arms, inner thighs, behind my knees and at the base of my back. I woke up itching and did sleep-scratching. I couldn’t think what had caused it: I was using fragrance-free everything and wearing loose clothes and it was no better. Finally I sent an online query to my GP with photos of my angry arms. I was called within 5 minutes and asked to see a GP ten minutes later.

The GP was lovely, but she was stumped. It doesn’t look like urticaria. She couldn’t understand the lesions; but I could. I’m a terrible scratcher and never let wounds heal quickly. And now I had created many more wounds by scratching so hard because the itch was so bad. She said, “I think it may be scabies.”

Er, what? Scabies mites are usually got from communal environments. For weeks now I have lived like a hermit nun. Scabies also usually starts between the fingers, and my hands were fine. But I accepted the treatment because desperation works like that even though I had to dose myself with permethrin insecticide, wash everything I could in high temperatures and seal everything else in a plastic bag for at least three days. I did all that and was terrified I’d killed my cat when she came in for a nuzzle the morning after. (She’s fine although no thanks to all the people setting off fireworks until beyond midnight.)

And I’m itching worse. It’s not scabies. I am sure it is Covid f*cking with my skin. I asked on Twitter if anyone else had had the itch after Covid and several people said yes. The Itch is even on the NHS Covid Recovery site.

The only thing that helps is hydrocortisone cream, but as a pharmacist told me with fierce sternness on Sunday, I should only use it sparingly and on small patches of the body and not on broken skin. Oh. So I’m back on aloe vera and willpower, and although neither are perfect, they are holding the itch at a tolerable distance.

Aloe, my friend

My mother told me that when she was pregnant with me, she had a terrible itch. It was so bad she could not sit on the sofa. She had me, and they discovered she had a dodgy thyroid, treated that, and the itch went. She empathises. Her itching was so awful, “I often thought I wouldn’t inflict this on my worst enemy.”

If you have not itched to the point of opening your skin with your fingernails, you are a very lucky person.

So I’ve been reading into The Itch (as well as coming to the end of the fish book; another reason for the itch, I think: an entirely knackered immune system) and found this 2020 paper on the physiology and pathphysiology of itch. Does removing the definite article make it a malevolent force?

“Itching is an unpleasant sensation which provokes the desire to scratch.” So began the previous review on the physiology of itching in this journal in 1941, written by the father of investigative dermatology, Stephen Rothman. This definition was penned by Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660, with pruritus, an identical term, in place of itch. The defi- nition continues to appear regularly at the beginning of manuscripts. Why such reinforcement occurs, unique to this topic, is indicative of the fascination that surrounds itch. Scratching an itch can also be pleasurable (269). The poet Ogden Nash wrote that happiness is to have a scratch for every itch. The sensation may be unpleasant, the scratching response rewarding, but patients who suffer from acute or chronic itch, which affects 15% of the population, are miserable.

Of course we’re miserable. Itching is the skin sending out pain signals. Itching, the authors wrote, was often thought to have the role of removing “environmental insults from the skin.” I remember this word “insult” from writing about trauma. It’s shocking to a layperson who now thinks of the word as only being verbal. But in medicine it has total physicality. My skin is insulted. An unbearable itch feels exactly like that.

Some of the words in that paper make me itch: allergens, pruritogens, irritants; mast cells, histamines, neuropeptides, dermis, itch sensory neurons.

As I write this, my right forearm is itching, and my torso underneath my bra strap, and the back of my right thigh. An itchy hamstring.

I think that like most people I usually treat my skin with ignorant ungratitude. Now I am hyperaware of it, enveloping me, keeping me safe, but driving me nuts.

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#Amwriting

Writers have routines. I have a routine. Here it is:

• 6am: at my desk

• 7pm: go home after writing 10,000 perfect words

• 7.15pm: go for a ten-mile run

• 11pm: go to bed and sleep deeply

• 6am: start again

HA HA HA

There was a period in the summer when I would get up and go to my allotment for half an hour at least. That was great. Now it’s too dark.

My actual routine:

• 7am: Wake up gently to my dawn-light clock but snooze until 8

• 8am: Have tea and toast in bed with my cat next to me. Do, in this order: Read some French crime fiction, Spelling Bee, Wordle, read the news.

• 9am: get up

• 9.30ish but probably more like 10: at my desk

  Every 40 minutes I get up and do 5 minutes of yoga.

• 12am: lunch

• 3.30pm: afternoon nap

• 4.30-7pm: work the hardest I’ve done all day

• 7.30pm: home and cook something

• 8pm: watch French crime drama

• 9pm: bed

It’s not going to get any prizes from productivity gurus, but I’ve written 120,000 words and I even like some of them, so I’m sticking to it.

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Animal hero of the week : the wrasse

Not a single animal this week, and I’m not even specifying a species of wrasse, when there are loads of them. But my goodness the wrasse is cool. And the abilities of the wrasse, if you are of sound mind, will persuade you that fish are definitely, actually, sentient. And yes of course they feel pain. So would you if your gills were cut when you were suffocating in air. Anyway, the wrasse, the smart little thing: in 2018, a team of researchers put a wrasse in a tank with a mirror. They also put a mark on the wrasse’s body. This is called a mirror-mark test. If the subject sees the image in the mirror and then tries to remove the mark, then they are self-aware. It is judged to be the pre-eminent sign of consciousness.

And the wrasse, that dumb unfeeling fish, passed the mirror mark test. Not just then but recently too. Recently the bluestreak wrasse even understand that a photograph of them was not a rival wrasse, so didn’t attack it. When they were presented with a composite image that included other fish and themselves, they only attacked the image of the other fish.

How. Cool. Is. That.

Here is a video of the bluestreak wrasse doing its thing though frankly it’s not exactly overwhelming to watch. Which I suppose is why fish are still thought to be inanimate things in the water and not much else.

This week I have also been writing about fish tool use (for which there is a whole website!) and goldfish driving (for which there is not).

Coincidentally, the really excellent book What a Fish Knows, by Jonathan Balcombe, is on sale on Kindle today for 99 pence. I know. 99 pence for years of hard work and brain power. It’s wrong. But it’s also a fabulous book so if it increases Jonathan’s sales, buy a copy even while you wince.