I Was a Pre-Teen Thing

The Desenex regimen went on for a few months. My mom would call me into the bathroom and I would go, whimpering like a dog that knows it’s about to go to the vet. I would take off all my clothes and Mom would rub Desenex all over my body. Wherever she put it, my skin would start to burn. I would start to hop up and down in agony, and when she finished the last patch of skin I would run screaming down the hall naked, my body on fire.

My skin didn’t get better. It did get redder and more inflamed. I had become the Thing from the Fantastic Four, right down to the orange color. One day I went to school and asked the student teacher (who was such a nice pushover that he spent most of the time trying to calm the chaos that erupted every time the regular teacher left the room) about an assignment. He looked down at me, took my face in both hands (which felt strange because no one did that) and said, “Oh my God! You’re cracking up!” He sent me to the nurse, who called my mother. Now that there was a recognized public problem, my mom had to take me to a dermatologist, who was very expensive. When we told him about our treatment regimen, he involuntarily exclaimed, “On no! That’s the worst possible thing to put on it!” My mom and I just looked at him as if he didn’t speak English.

The doctor gave me prescriptions for two creams, one with cortisone, and one with urea in it. It was like a miracle, how quickly my skin got better. The eczema (my Thing condition now had a name) disappeared, almost overnight.

Today people tell me I have great skin, and aren’t I lucky to have been born with such great skin. They’re right; it is nice—finally. I will have to buy and use the Aquaphilic 10% urea cream every day for the rest of my life. But that seems a small price to pay for keeping the Thing at bay.