POD person no more

[flexagon]

It appears that my adventures* with peri-nubblification (aka peri-orificial dermatitis) are over. I finished out my half-dose course of doxycycline a week ago, and stopped taking it with no particular drama.

Today I had my follow-up dermatology appointment, which I went to with the primary intent of giving feedback to the dermatologist for not telling me what to expect. The wind was taken out of my sails by my lateness (three busses in a row went past without taking passengers); the receptionist was dismissive, and I wondered if the whole thing was a petty waste of time. But when I actually saw the derm, she seemed delighted that my face was better, and I was kind of glad to be delivering good news to someone.

We talked about what to do if the nubbles come back (which they are unlikely to do with much ferocity if I avoid using cortisone on my face). She was sympathetic when I told her my skin had peeled a lot. "I wish I had known what to expect," I said, more gently than I'd expected to, and she said the peeling was unusual and also that it's really hard to predict, that some people actually do take two months to start responding to the medication. She also told me that mine was the worst case she'd seen ("I bet you don't hear that a lot." "No, I don't, do I get a prize?"). So maybe she wasn't so unsympathetic; maybe she was a bit out of her depth and doing the best she could.

Some non-dairy probiotic foods I should probably be trying to ingest at this point: kombucha tea (hmmm), lacto-fermented pickles, miso soup, unpasteurized sauerkraut, tempeh (yick), kimchi (yick), sourdough bread, olives, non-dairy yogurts.

* Adventures, should I want this later: diagnosis, eight days, four weeks, eight weeks.

Comments

[nevers.livejournal.com]

yay glad it's cleared up! and ugh i hate how much public transit can throw a wrench into getting to dr's appts on time.

since you seem unexcited by almost all of these probiotic food suggestions, maybe just buy a nondairy probiotic supplement? also i think that they are all dead in sourdough bread, wouldn't they be?

[flexagon]

Not a bad idea. I'm happy enough with the miso soup and pickles and olives and (if it's true) sourdough bread. (If it's not true, it's still tasty.) Non-dairy yogurt is easy, too. But I don't really have a good idea of how much of these things I should be eating, or for how long, to get my gut bacteria back to some kind of "normal". With a supplement I'd have some notion of steadiness, and could do it for a few weeks.

[nevers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's definitely a good question. I have read that there is no way that you can really repopulate your gut with the minor amount of bacteria that are in those foods and the amount you can reasonably eat them per day. The counterargument would be that probiotic foods are how we populated our guts in the first place... but that's not accounting for everything being wiped out by medication.

[flexagon]

I thought the idea is that once you get 'em in there, they breed...

[nevers.livejournal.com]

it depends, some are "transient" but still beneficial while they're there, while others set up colonies. i don't know which are which, though.

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the skin!

I absolutely love just every single food you mentioned. I've brewed my own kombucha, and my inner korean loves all the rest of it. Kim chi is YUM! TEMPEH IS AWESOME GRILLED! Sourdough makes great french toast.

AND PICKLES...