For new readers and those who request to be “好友 good friends” please read my 公告栏 first

Another Horrid medical Experience

For the past three days I was in the intensive care unit of a local hospital suffering from a full blown flare up of psoriasis. Psoriasis is one kind of auto-immune disease in which the immune system start to attack your own healthy body cell instead of foreign invading cells. The objects of psoriasis attack are your skin cells (causing constant peeling and shedding of skins and in more severe cases your body joints causing psoriatic-arthritics and painful movement. Not much is known about the origin and cause of these auto-immune diseases. The only effective treatment is various kind immune suppressive drug which basically disables your immune system. But this has deadly side effects since you no longer have any defense against flu, TB, cancer, etc. while taking these drug. On the other hand, sunlight seems to stop psoriasis, thus face, hand, and neck skins are not affected by the disease.

I had psoriasis for forty years and managed to live with it without taking these deadly drugs. Then six days ago, for unknown reasons my psoriasis suddenly had a full blown flare up. The skins of my whole body (100%) including face, eyelids, lips, and neck are burning with pain and peeling, body joint are inflamed and in pain. Movement are difficult. Of course, when admitted into the hospital in emergency, doctors suspected other worse possibilities such as kidney failure or worse. Morphine shots were administered so that I can have some kind of rest. Various blood tests were repeated over the three days to eliminate all other medical possibilities. Then I am send home to recover. There are special creams which must be applied to the whole body three times a day and pain medicine so that I can move around with minor difficulty. I have not opted for the immune-suppressive medicine yet thinking the trade off is not worthwhile (as a compromise with the doctors, I agree to take Prednisone which is a much milder form of immune suppressice drug with no known deadly side effects). In the meantime, I cancelled all engagements for the next several days and hope for the best.