My journey with psoriasis

Jon Russell
6 hours ago
2 min read

Morning

This is quite a personal story and will involve some graphic medical information. If it’s not for you, no worries.

A couple of days ago an old colleague from a previous job reached out to me to ask me for help with her friend that was suffering from psoriasis.

Back in 2005, I had no idea what this was.

As the year progressed, I started seeing these changes on my skin and patches of red flaky skin started appearing.

I went to the doctor, they said “Have you changed your washing powder?”. I said “No”. By this point it had started appearing on my legs, hair and face. The doctor provided no solution, so I went to a NHS drop in clinic. Here they explained that after my recent bout of tonsillitis, the tonsillitis virus had gone internal and then came back out as plaque psoriasis.

I was then referred to the first of many dermatologists. I started off having narrowband UVB sun bed treatment. I would stand up in this hexagonal stand up sun bed for 3 minutes at a time for 3 times a week. It made a dent in it. But truly never got better.

For the best part of 13 years this went on. Various different things were tried but nothing truly worked.

This was in 2018

My entire body was like this. By this point it was 98% coverage.

The lowest point was when I was on a tube train going through Picadilly station and a lady sat next to me, and I could feel her looking at my face and hands. She got up and moved away from me. Then until I got to my stop no one sat either side of me and it was a busy train. That hurt that day.

Luckily I then got referred to Dr Siah Tee. For the first time I felt like someone was truly listening to me. I explained all of the different treatments, creams, diets that I had been using or been on and that nothing was working.

She explained there was a medication called ustekinumab which could potentially work.

It was an injection and I would take it once every 3 months.

This was a life changing result.

I went from 98% coverage to 2% after the third dose.