Week #19

It has been a while since my last posting. I just recently accepted a job and had to adjust from being a housewife to a working person. Scheduling, waking up early, getting home late and finding a way to get to appointments was quite a challenge at first. I think, I have finally found my groove.

My son in the last six weeks has had his ups and downs. Two weeks ago he had his cysts injected again. They were getting pretty bad. The dermatologist changed up his medication regiment also at this appointment. He is now taking the steroids every other day and his Accutane (30mg) daily. As an experiment, I suggested he not eat processed foods and to start really pushing the fluids. What a difference I am seeing now! Usually, it takes only a week after getting injected to see the cysts coming back. This time all the cysts, that were injected, stayed down! :) Only one started swelling again; the one under his right eye. Other than that, his face really is starting to look much smoother and clearer. His back on the other hand is much worse. If you recall the earlier photos of his back in this blog...just double the amount of blemishes and that is what he has now. He even has a few on the back of his arms. He has an appointment set for this coming Monday to drain his cysts, but I am happily going to call and cancel! Knock on wood, but I think he is finally starting to heal! I think he even is starting to feel better about himself. A lot less self-conscience. He even comes with us every weekend to the roller rink. It is really nice watching him have fun.

Week #13

Week #12

I think, if you take away the cysts, we look as good as week 5. Progress? I hope so, but I don't want to jinx it by saying so.

Week #11

Not much to say this week. Notice the cysts now developing on his left cheek.

Week #10

Well, things got a little interesting at our last dermatology appointment. Because I missed my son's last appointment, this appointment was with a different nurse practitioner. She treated us like brand new patients and essentially started our medication regiment over.

She told us she had another case similar to ours where the high dose of accutane actually caused more irritation. She said she ended up lowering this other patient's dose of accutane which his body responded to much better. I guess this young man is cured and according to the nurse cant even tell he had acne.

So... she weighed my son and decided that 30 mg was the correct dose for someone 102 lbs. That was a decrease of 10 mg. She also put him back on a low dose of steroids and added an antibiotic. She thought the cysts on his right cheek may have a small infection festering in them. She did drain a couple of them and the fluid did look yellowish??? So maybe there was, I don't know.

I brought up his acne surgery, because the second appointment for that was coming up. The nurse said as long as there was noticeable swelling and irritation there should be no acne surgery. So we canceled our next appointment until further notice.

The nurse then asked my son how he was dealing emotionally with his acne. He responded with his usual "I don't know" She then asked if he felt self conscience or if kids at school were being mean. He answered with a "yeah kinda". She mentioned that some patients find it helpful to start home schooling....GRRRRRR This is not a new idea for us because I have mentioned this before to my family, but it was the first time a nurse/dr had brought it up to me.

Before we left the office we were introduced to a beautiful young lady who was suffering from a cyst on her right cheek and acne similar to my son's. She was starting her second month of accutane and it looked like she was really responding well to the drug. She was, I believe, in her late teens and both kids were kind of embarrassed by the situation. The nurse was trying to show me how cysts often start merging together. I thanked her for letting us observe her and she responded with a great question. The question I asked when we started down this accutane road...."why isn't there a support group set up for people who are on this drug. I smiled and gave her our blog address and my e-mail. I told her she could contact us anytime and that she could consider us the first two people in her support group. :)

The next day the nurse contacted me to tell me she spoke to the doctor about my son's situation and he decided to drop the accutane dose even further. So now we are doing the 30 mg every other day, essentially doing 15 mg every day. I have to admit that I am feeling like this is all still very experimental. I know each person's response is different, but it doesn't help us feel any better....

We missed last weeks blog because my son went on a Washington D.C. trip with his eighth grade class. I know he was stressed about it, but I was proud he decided to go through with it. Truth be told, I think he had a good time for the most part. He said the kids weren't too bad to him and he seemed to get along with his roommates.

He has been home for two days now and his face is looking really good! I think stress is playing a bigger role than we think with his acne. The last photo was taken today the others are from Friday afternoon. You can see the difference just two stress free days did for his face. The redness is much less and the swelling on the right is down. He wasn't able to use warm compresses while he was in D.C. so we will start that back up tonight.

I circled a section on his back because I wanted you to see how much worse his back is getting. When we first started on accutane he only had six or so in this circled area. Now as you can see its getting out of control.

Week #8

Last week we went in for Acne Surgery. The technician extracted many black heads with an unusual device. Used like a pen this device, from what I understood, had a small needle at the end along with a suction capability. The tech first numbed the face with a topical. We waited about 30 minutes until he was numb. The bottom picture shows us goofing around and laughing at the hair band. That smile was quickly reversed however, when it was time to get busy extracting. I am not sure how much numbing ability the cream had but, I can tell you that he tolerated only a very short time without much pain. After about five minutes he started his usual shaking and moaning. The right side was the worse as you can see from the photo there was a good amount of pressure being placed on those cysts. The ears were the second most tender. Its hard to get in there and both ears have cysts behind them.

The next day his face looked really good. The cysts were down and just having all those black dots gone improved his overall look.

The last photo was taken Sunday afternoon. He is making slow improvements. I feel we are doing the proverbial one step forward and two steps back. Today his cysts are swelling again.

We kind of got lax on our hot compresses and aloe over the holidays. It was hard to remember when we were busy entertaining friends and family. Last night, without being told, he did do the warm compresses. So we will get back on track with that because that did help with the dryness for sure.

I pulled an air head moment this week when I forgot about his derm appointment. I saw and actually said out loud the night before "oh tomorrow is your appointment" Well for some reason I found it important to go shopping when I should have been taking him in. I was so upset with myself!! I called immediately to reschedule but, I was told they were book solid all week at both locations. To make a long story short I ended up calling Monday morning and someone did cancel and I grabbed that time slot. Just in time to because he only had four more pills left. Good Grief, I will not do that again!!!

Week #7

I was so busy getting ready for the holidays I forgot to post a picture last week. My son is still improving on his left side. His right is starting to show the same three cysts. In addition there is a new cyst, that I mentioned on week 5's post, on his jaw line that continues to swell. He is still taking his steroids, Accutane, using compresses and finishing with Aloe.
I don't know if there is a correlation or not, but it seems the higher the humidity the worse he starts to get. It might be a coincidence, but I will try to remember to ask the dermatologist if there is anything to be said about that. We have an appointment next week.