I have finished my course of steroids, and my SIXTY lip oil pens arrived the same day. The dose of steroids started with six pills per day and ended with one per day, and now I am feeling glum and missing the perky feeling I had when I was taking the medicine.
Also, I have a big hive on the back of my neck, so apparently this is not over. Some light research shows that the hive itself is not an indication of impending death, and that some people Just Get Hives, especially in stressful situations SUCH AS WATCHING A VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE LESS THAN A MONTH BEFORE A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION. A trip to an allergist seems warranted but not urgent. In the meantime, I am going to try to pay attention to detergents and foods and whatever else might be contributing.
Stress hives are A Thing! I get stress hives. It’s usually a single itchy hive, I tend to get it on my hips or upper legs. Super fun. But I too watch detergents, soaps, etc. because I’m also contact allergic to fabric softener and a few other things. As an aside, when you talk about putting aside things and stocking up for autumn/The Situation, I use Dropps baby/sensitive laundry pods, which are eco friendly and come on a handy subscription mail service and have been super reliable through the pandemic. We use their dishwasher pods too. The plan we are on means we usually have an unopened box of each when the next arrives, which has been very comforting for the last 30 or so weeks.
So I’ve been having some seemingly random hives lately, too, and finally figured out the cause. I’ve started taking a hot bath at night in recent months for the sole purpose of relaxation (I’m a morning showerer), and noticed the last two hive breakouts were coincidentally right after a bath. My body wash doesn’t usually cause problems (I use the same morning and night), so what I suspect is maybe the water was too hot and it’s a hive-y heat rash sort of reaction? Because I was a little sweaty both times as well. So alllllll this time I thought I was doing something nice for my body but was in fact causing it further stress. Sigh.
You might want to try cleaning your tub well with vinegar or just scrubbing with a cloth and hot water, and then rinsing really well. My money is on a light residue of the cleaner you use on the tub causing the reaction.
That makes sense! I’ll try that this weekend. I hate to give up my baths.
I had full body hives this summer for a few days before heading to the dr. A shot and some steroid pills and they did not return. My course of prednisone was two weeks. I suspected that stress/near panic attack triggered it, but who knows.
A few times in my life I’ve had phases of generally deeply unpleasant, unbearably itchy recurrent hives – the technical term for what I get is giant urticaria apparently. It’s always started when there’s been a sudden shift to warmer weather and I’ve been stressed or run down, or fighting off a bug. And then it’s persisted (on and off) for anywhere between a few days and six months. Blow dry my hair? Boom. Drink a glass of wine? Boom. Be in a stressful situation? Boom. The rash is worst on my face, chest and torso. Antihistamines bring it back under control until the next time. I used to call it The Blotch.
Yours doesn’t sound identical (although have you just started putting the heat on regularly?) but I just wanted to agree that yes, stress is a big trigger. And well, 2020 is 2020. Really hope you get to the bottom of it soon!
Oh! I should maybe also add that while I was at university and in the midst of a big flare-up, I also took two aspirin by mistake (I’d been casually warned by an earlier doctor to avoid it because of the hives break-outs). And that triggered what initially seemed to be an especially itchy day of hives and then turned out to be anaphylactic shock… so it would seem there’s a strong correlation between the two things. One to ask your allergist about if you tend to take aspirin?
If asked during stressful times how I feel, I always say I feel fine and calm and non-stressed – look at how relaxed and well adjusted I am! And people who know me marvel at how I seem so low-key and well adjusted under stress. But when I started to get eczema between a few of my fingers this year (sometime after March), I realized that I also got eczema on my fingers – though that time on my nailbeds and not on the webbing – when I was in grad school and living through the highest stress levels I’ve ever encountered (even worse than now, believe it or not, and most wasn’t caused directly by school but by people with whom I was interacting).
So yeah, it may be something else entirely in your situation, but it’s certainly possible that your hives have been brought on by the extraordinary pressure 2020 is putting on, well, you, but also everyone. I can totally empathize, no matter the cause.
*waves frantically* I have stress eczema on my hands too! It started in the spring and has actually gotten better recently (go to treatments: Aquaphor, hydrocortisone). But there’s always something… in the summer I added hair loss (possibly also weaning related) and more recently, headaches to my list of what I can only assume are stress induced afflictions. The cost of maintaining a cool exterior…
Hair Loss – this has been my stress response. I first experienced it many years ago when my ex-husband abruptly announced that he no longer wanted to be married (but so graciously waited until 3 months to the day after my twin sister died to tell me this). More recently I started losing my hair at an alarming rate in May and it only tapered off to a normal amount about a month ago. (Fortunately, I have exceptionally thick hair so my hair loss is not noticeable to most people) Even better, all the new hairs that are coming in now are white. I now have very long brown hair with short white hairs sticking up all over – I’m calling it 2020 Hair and I’m happy to have it.
Samesies. I’ve had it since I was nine. I used to literally call them stress bumps, which is nicer than my brother, who called them my finger herp-ity-derp. (What stresses a nine year old? That year my parents divorced, one died, the other came out, and I skipped a grade. 1997; do not recommend.)
Anyway, three people makes a club. Shawna can be president. Our uniform is gloves.
Fortunately the bar for presidential behaviour has been set VERY LOW lately!
Also 1997 sounds pretty frickin’ terrible! I don’t think 95-98 were particularly good for me either, but nothing like yours!
I’d note that my mom’s hay fever magically cleared up when she cut down on dairy (they were randomly low on milk, so she saved it for my dad, which I’d normally be kind of mad about because feminism, but in this case: two days without milk = no hay fever led to her deliberately cutting down on milk in her life, which massively reduced her sinus-y allergy symptoms (note: she still eats cheese). So! As annoying as “the allergy could be adding up from any source of irritation, including food sources” is because we want it to be one easily identifiable thing that is Easy and Free and Not Annoying to eliminate… the reality may be that it’s a stack of stuff *but* that you can make it substantially better if you can ID anything in the stack and eliminate it. (I mean: my mom is allergic to pollen; this is simply a fact; but her pollen allergy isn’t annoying unless her body is also trying to cope with milk, at which point it goes awry. Other people I know have had things magically clear up when they stopped eating gluten or whatever it was that it turned out they were non-anaphylactically allergic to.)
I’d also suggest air filters as something to consider which is just a “purchase, set up, done” rather than a food-diary or other investigative search. There is the cheap-but-incredibly-dicey-looking method of twisty-tying or zip-tying a 20*20 air filter onto a box fan, or there are lots of large or small air filter models. We got a fair lifespan out of the Hamilton Beach desktop-y air filter, but really anything that will knock dust/pollen/mold/whatever out of the air without driving you nuts will get you somewhere. If you’re air-purifying one room, your bedroom is probably the way to go (and hey! bonus white noise!). Then if you notice a difference between how you feel in Room With Filter vs. Elsewhere In House, start adding air purification to the rest of the house and/or get someone to clean out the HVAC system and replace the filters with something perhaps more filter-y (but not so filter-y that it’ll burn out your HVAC system’s fan).
I guess: I’d bet that the top thing that’s just making this all Too Much For Your Body is stress. But unless you have good techniques for chilling out your body from stress (deep breathing, meditation, yoga, whatever) or can decrease your stress (I assume most of your stress is pandemic/national-news related, in which case reducing consumption of news can sometimes help but it’s not the same kind of “help” as, say, the stress load change resulting from shifting within a company from working under an abusive boss to working under a functional, kind boss), then tackling the non-stress components might stop the whole domino-chain-reaction thing even if the stress persists for a while (I am hoping it will not. I am really hoping that all our stress levels go dooooown by a huge amount on November 3).
I hope you feel better soon! And sorry about the no-more-steroids body-letdown and the new hive auuugh.
Have you added a big serving of fruits or veggies or anything else colorful to your diet? I finally figured out my hives are related to salicylates in foods, which are high in colorful fruits and veggies. I’ve had hives off and on my whole life, and this time I set them off by adding kale smoothies to my diet. I gave myself a few months of few salicylates (very boring diet!) but now I can eat pretty normally again without breaking out. Hope you can find what helps! Most docs will just shrug and say “sometimes we don’t know why you have hives” which is so dang frustrating! My hives would go away overnight so it just seemed like something had to be causing it! I finally found the salicylates issue after googling tomato allergy.
My daughter went though a months-long bout of huge hives last year. We did the whole workup at the allergist, and found out she is allergic to dust mites but that they weren’t causing the hives. The cause remains a mystery, perhaps auto-immune (which terrified me) and yes, they were kind of blase about ideopathic hives…but they did give her some good coping treatments (Zyrtec helps with hives, who knew?). They had her taking two different types of OTC treatments, one morning and one night, so it might be worth your time as well to inquire. She found that being really disciplined about not scratching them helped, and staying on schedule with the 2 types of OTC treatments helped as well. Also she suffered more at her waistband area and anywhere else her clothes rubbed on her. She spent many evenings in bed, naked but for a sheet, reading and trying not to scratch. Good luck!
This summer, in the midst of a pandemic and also a very stressful BAD JOB situation and also a very stressful BUYING A HOME situation I just…started breaking out in hives. It had never happened before and I didn’t even know for sure if they WERE hives because it was so weird and I had never gotten them before, and one day my truly terrible boss was saying truly terrible things to me and by the time I was off the phone, while I had managed not to start rage crying, my arms were covered in hives. I also started getting stress NOSE BLEEDS. And then once the stress hives gates had opened, it seems like just a thing that happens now? Like I had to get to this critical mass level of stress and upset feelings for it to happen the first time, but once it happened that FIRST time, it seems to happen fairly easily now? Like the stress hives damn has broken. The stress nose bleeds thankfully seem to have subsided once I changed jobs.
Stress hives are definitely a thing, and I get them, but not to the same extent as you are having them. I’m a smidge worried that another hive hopped out as soon as you ended your course of steroids, but not enough worried to say hie thee to thy allergist, good lady, and that right quickly. Can I please request however that if you feel your ears or your eyes itching, or a cough starting, or hives in more than one place at a time, that you get to urgent care again?
And in the meantime, take some more benedryl.
Yeah, I’m with Liz: the level of reaction you’ve described here does not put you in a “recommended, not urgent” category to me. Sure, it could be stress hives, but it might not be. If it’s an allergy, the level of allergic response you’re experiencing is not something to invite. And I can also tell you that it doesn’t have to be something “new” for you to be allergic to it. Twice in my life I have added new allergies during times of stress, and they’ve been to things I was previously 100% fine with. I have an Epipen prescription because my response to one of the allergens was escalating with each exposure prior to diagnosis and an all-stop on exposure.
Please set up an appointment. Hives alone are bad enough, but hives plus this pattern of foot swelling, pain, and difficulty walking seems like something that warrants better investigation. And not necessarily accepting a doctor’s “it’s probably X, off you go,” response, unless it truly solves the problem. Keep a really sharp eye on anything going on with you physically and keep pushing for treatment if it isn’t truly resolved. (I may have read too many of the Washington Post’s Medical Mysteries series last month. There’s a lot of “went to the doctor, doctor brushed it off or misdiagnosed, and the person suffered for years” in those.)
I know two people with anaphylactic allergies to cold. And they (like me) live in CANADA!
My daughter is allergic to the cold (along with several other things), and we live in Minnesota!
I had idiopathic hives for over FIVE YEARS. They came and went, and when they came they made me INSANE. I was taking up to four Claritin a day for them. And now my allergist has me on an injectable medication and I haven’t had one single teensy hive since I began, and my whole quality of life has changed, I could weep for gratitude, hooray for doctors.
I had idiopathic hives and swelling (mostly in my hands/feet) pretty severely for a year in my 20s. I went through lots of medical tests, and my doctors finally decided mine were just some unknown autoimmune issue. I took immune suppressing drugs for that period (allergy drugs didn’t help me), from steroids to some more powerful drugs (the drug they give to post transplant patients actually). After around a year, I woke up one day and was fine. I have had some very brief flare ups in the years since, but never anything that severe. Definitely see an allergist—there are all kinds of potential explanations, and things that are easy to treat could be a possible cause. I’m sorry, it is a frustrating and painful problem. :(
True story: a friend of mine broke out in large hives every single time she had to see her mother-in-law. (And ONLY when she had to see her mother-in-law.) It stopped when my friend got divorced and no longer had to see this woman.
I will not discount the stress aspect, because that seems quite possible/likely, but agree with others it could be some odd trigger. My daughter at age 3 developed hives, and we went through an entire allergy panel and determined she is allergic to cats. We have had cats our whole lives, long before she came along. However, her daycare provider had gotten a cat. So I guess a new cat was what caused the allergy. She takes Zyrtec still (nearly 4 years later-she gets itchy without it) and she does have sensitive skin, but it has controlled the hives.
She also for a while took Singulair and ranitidine because they block other histamine receptors, or something? Singulair isn’t great for kids (behavior issues), and ranitidine they stopped making or something, so we took her off both of those. Just wondering if you were taking a heartburn med and stopped, if it was handling some histamines and you didn’t know it? Just a thought.