These words will forever be ingrained in my mind! My nan would say this on a regular basis when I was a child. Although she meant it lovingly and said the scratching in a very exaggerated way, she even added an odd accent to the word to make me laugh, I still couldn’t help but feel embarrassed about my scratching, furthermore, I would go away and hide so that I could scratch in peace!
I know people think they mean well and I catch myself telling my daughter to stop scratching occasionally, but what I found helps most of all for my daughter is distraction and to remove the hand away without saying a word, or whilst talking about a totally different subject.
Inevitably sometimes you just gotta scratch and get it over with!! Sometimes there is no way around it! I know my fellow sufferers can relate! When people say to me, “Why do you scratch when it’ll only make it worse” I ask them “If you had a sensation of insects crawling all over your arm, could you just sit there and ignore it?” Food for thought eh!?
Charlene
Hi all, my name is Charlene and I have had eczema pretty much since birth. This annoying skin condition has always been a pain, but recently, it's taken over my life! The only good side of this is it's forced me to look into exactly what is going on in my body and try to look for any triggers, the quality of my diet and in return, avoid anything that I believe may affect me as much as possible. I hope my blog will give you some insight into the reality of living with eczema in the family. Visit me at http://www.itchscratchreliefcycle.blogspot.com/
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I totally identify with this. I used to say this to my daughter – I think it’s the most natural thing to say even though you know it’s not the right thing to say! In the end I used to say ‘rub it’ as that helped and lessened the damage to the skin.
Wonder if anyone else has any techniques they can share?
on May 17, 2012 at 9:07 am Deborah Mason