Living With Chronic Itchiness

Did you know chronic itchiness can be just as debilitating as chronic pain?

Hi! My name is Jenny, and I have psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis, which means that I live with both chronic pain and chronic itchiness.

It’s funny (but not in a “ha ha” way — in more of an unfortunate way) because whenever my psoriasis is doing well, my psoriatic arthritis seems to act up.

Then, whenever my psoriatic arthritis is doing well my psoriasis seems to flare. They can never seem to get on the same page.

This means that I’m often either living with chronic pain or chronic itchiness. Both are horrible, but I feel like I hear less about the negative effect that chronic itchiness can have on a person’s quality of life than I hear about chronic pain.

Since it’s not talked about as much, I wanted to share with you my experience of living with specifically scalp psoriasis and therefore chronic itchiness.

Sometimes, my scalp flares so badly that it causes me to itch and scratch so much that my scalp bleeds.

Occasionally, I’m not aware of the fact that I’m scratching, and it’s not until family members or friends point it out that I notice.

That can be embarrassing, especially if a stranger ends up noticing or pointing it out because I’m always worried they’ll think I have lice or something contagious.

When I go to hair appointments, especially with new hairdressers, I always make sure to tell them I have psoriasis upfront so they don’t think I have something contagious.

The extreme itchiness I sometimes experience leads to scratching which then leads to dandruff and dead skin building up on my shoulders. This is another embarrassing and emotionally challenging thing about living with scalp psoriasis.

I hate having dandruff build up on my shoulders. It’s especially noticeable when I’m wearing black, and often I don’t notice it happening until it’s already there.

Having people potentially think that I’m unclean or that I don’t practice personal hygiene makes me feel so uncomfortable and even sad.

People I know will brush the dandruff off of my shoulders for me thinking that they’re being helpful, but I’ll be completely honest: I hate it when people do that. It makes me feel worse.

Sometimes I’m kept awake at night by the scratching, which leads to bad sleep and feeling exhausted the next morning. This exhaustion is compounded by the fatigue I already experience related to my psoriatic arthritis, and some days I seriously question how I will make it through.

I’ve had scalp psoriasis since I was 12 years old, and I remember when I was around that age wishing on my birthday candles that someone could take away my psoriasis. I knew that if I could just have a break from the itchiness, I would be so much happier in life.

That was all I wanted, and it makes me sad to think back to that time and to remember how miserable I felt at such a young age. Kids should be wishing for fun things, not serious things like that.

On many occasions, I have genuinely wanted to shave my head because having hair makes it difficult to treat the scalp skin. If I want my scalp managed well that means I need to shower every day for two weeks and apply a steroid shampoo every day in that period of time.

My normal routine is to wash my hair one to two times per week, so you can see that having scalp psoriasis is like a mini full-time job on the side.

I’m not saying that chronic pain isn’t bad. I just want to point out that living with chronic itchiness can be pretty tough too.

My therapist always reminds me: There is no “worse” Olympics.

We’re all living with something and the very best thing we can do for each other is try to understand each other’s difficulties so we can support one another the best we can.