Maybe the carpet is evil.

                                 

So... if money were not an issue, I would totally buy some of these adorable pajamas from the Cotton Comfort line of clothing made especially for kids like Sam with eczema. These look so awesome!  No socks to pull off, 100% gentle cotton, flat non-irritating seams, attached mitten to prevent nighttime scratching, so soft.  Sadly these are quite costly and they aren't located in the US either. Boo.

Each day now I try to dress Sam to protect him from our carpet. It might be 80 degrees in GA but Sam is in long sleeves and long pants in the house, with crew socks pulled up to his knees over his pant legs. But who am I kidding, those clothes do not stay the way I arrange them. He's a little monkey! He rolls around and climbs and falls and wrestles with his siblings. He pulls his socks off any chance he gets, his pant legs get pushed up, his shirt comes up over his pudgy little belly, and by night time all of these areas are irritated.  He plays on and is in contact with the carpet all day long.  He is almost two, there is really no keeping him off of it.

Why am I so concerned about the carpet? Well, when we moved into our town home our landlord told us ours was the last unit that had not been renovated with new carpet and tile. We were okay with that at the time, we had to move quickly and could not wait for another unit.  I have since learned this carpet is probably 7 to 10 years old.  Who knows how many times it has been "cleaned" with harsh chemical cleaners. Not only that, who knows how much mold and dust is embedded deep in the fibers?! As I've learned from studying the Solve Eczema website, dust is made mostly of human skin cells and hair and lint, which for probably 95% of humans walking around, are covered in detergent residues from our laundry solutions, lotions, shampoos, deodorant, etc.  So for my purposes, dust = detergent.  It's no wonder, if my suspicions are correct, that his little legs and feet and arms up are flaming red by the end of every day after rubbing up on that carpet. (And I'm sure this is the case with our furniture too, which are third generation hand me downs).

I may have already posted this picture in a previous post, but for the purpose of illustrating my point, here it is again. Notice where his eczema is so much worse. Now, I should interject here that I do still believe Sam has a fair amount of ingestion related eczema. But it is quite obvious from these photos that those arms and legs are largely contact eczema. Otherwise they wouldn't follow his clothing line so precisely.

Another thing to note here is the area where the collar of his shirt would have been rubbing against his skin. Apparently synthetic materials in the collar of an otherwise 100% cotton t-shirt don't have to be listed as such, and those synthetic fibers retain higher levels of detergent. Another clue pointing towards detergent sensitivity.

As a side note... one of the first places on Sam's body to show severe eczema flare was the tops of his feet, around 6 months old. He'd always had it on his face, arms, pretty much everywhere but it was a scant, lacy rash (like on his belly above... you can barely see the eczema but it is still there).  His feet though were constantly bright red and irritated and I could not for the life of me figure out why it would be just his feet that were severely inflamed. Well now it makes sense, that was around the time he started army crawling and rolling around on the floor, wearing longer clothing in the winter but no socks. So it was just the tops of his feet being exposed constantly to the carpet. 

One last thought for tonight. I actually first came across the solve eczema website last fall, when Sam's eczema first started getting really bad and I was desperate for answers. I did a lot of research online and came across the website about how this mother traced her son's eczema to detergents and got rid of them all. I read the entire website and even thought about it for a few days. But in the end I thought no, Sam's eczema is definitely food allergy related. I was just starting to see an allergist, and we were working towards getting his skin clear for an allergy test, and I was so sure that would give me all the answers I needed. In comparison, the detergent thing sounded like so much work. So we did lots of elimination diets and food experiments all throughout the fall. I learned a few things to stay away from: Nuts (he's anaphylactic with those), dairy, citrus, tomatoes, oatmeal, bananas. Eliminating all those things did help, but Sam's arms and legs still looked like he'd been attacked by a colony of red ants.

It was not until two weeks ago that I was reminded of the website again.  I was at Kroger with all the kids late at night picking up some medicine for Sam. Adam was working late and Sam was too itchy and uncomfortable to sleep, and I had only just realized after bath time that we were out Vanicream, ointment, and Attarax liquid.  So I took him to the store in his jammies and we sat in the pharmacy area waiting for the prescriptions.  It is interesting how much worse Sam's eczema can appear in various lighting. The flourescent lighting in this particular area of the store, combined with how flared the skin was already after a bath, made for some truly horrific looking skin. I had Sam on my lap and he was busy taking his socks off repeatedly while I repeatedly put them back on. Finally I gave up and let him pull his pant legs up and scratch away. Sometimes that's easier than fighting him.

There was a man sitting not even a foot away from us and I saw that he was staring and staring at Sam's rashed skin. Finally he says to me with some alarm in his voice:  "It's the soap lady. The socks are eating his foot up! You need different soap." I told him we had already switched detergents twice, and it did not help, so that wasn't the issue. I informed him it was food allergies, and ended the conversation. He just kept staring like he didn't believe me and what I had said was the most ridiculous thing ever.

I was tempted to be annoyed with him. How dare he sit there and try to diagnose Sam after watching him for less than two minutes, while I had spent months working on solving this problem with blood, sweat, and tears. Did he think I was sitting by doing nothing while my son suffered?

And yet I could not stop thinking about the weak explanation I had just given him. Was I really convinced the "soap" as he called it was not an issue?  Sure we had switched detergents to milder formulations twice. First to Dreft, then to All Free and Clear.  And it did not help. But that did not mean it wasn't a detergent problem. Because both of those laundry detergents, while not as harsh as others, are still detergents! The man had called it soap, and its true that these days the terms are commercially interchangeable. It was while I was thinking all these thoughts that an idea from A.J. Lumsdaine, the solve-eczema mom, pushed its way into the forefront of my mind. Describing her own light bulb moment she had written something to this effect: Detergent and true soap are two distinctly different chemical classes. They are not the same. They have different properties. They behave differently. 

Yes, I had tried switching detergents. But I'd never tried switching to soap. Really, if a child is sensitive to detergent, how does it make sense to switch to another detergent?


Maybe he's right. Maybe the socks are eating Sam's feet up, because maybe he can't tolerate any detergent at all... not even the mild kind for babies. 


From that point on I could not shake the thought from my mind. As soon as the kids were in bed that night I went in search of the website and read everything again. A few days later I did the soap test, saw enough of a change to know we had to pursue this, and now here we are on this journey.

To the rude pharmacy man, thank you and bless you, wherever you are. :)