After her son’s birth, Stephanie Smith has spent a year in searching for answers on a serious skin condition that left her newborn child with a burn-like rash over most of his body. Can you imagine how shocked she was when she found that the answer lays in the treatment she was already using?
Isaiah, Smith’s son, started showing signs of this skin inflammation when he was only three months old. At the beginning, it was only a ring around a cut on his cheek, and then it quickly started spreading and became a raw, red rash every time he would come in touch with people wearing perfume or clothes with textile softener.
The pediatricians were saying it is eczema and were prescribing a low dose of corticosteroids, accessible over the counter.
Smith says that when she gave her son the corticosteroids his skin cleared up, but only for a week, and then they had to apply more.
This continued in a cycle of more than two months. After that, the baby’s hair began falling out, and he became ill and lethargic. More and more doctors kept saying it was eczema. They even told Smith to stop breastfeeding him since the protein from the milk could worsen the state.
The situation escalated so bad that they had to take him to the emergency room. There, the doctors injected him with steroids, and the condition got better, but only for 2 days. The rash returned, and it became worse than ever. The baby’s skin started oozing and bleeding.
Smith says that they could not even hold their own child.
Whenever they touched his skin with their own, the baby’s skin would blister and ooze like crazy. They could not even touch his cheeks with theirs. Even the towels were out of question since they are too rough for his skin. So they had to use cotton sheets. the baby was the most comfortable in the bathtub when the water was pouring over him, even though that did not mean that the pain is gone.
Every time he wept, Smith cried along. People were asking her question like what have they done to the baby, has he been in a fire and so on, because the baby’s skin did look like it had third degree burns. Even nurses were talking among themselves “Come and see this kid”… the total number of doctors who saw him was 35. and all of them said that it was eczema.
As the situation was getting worse, the family withdrew even more, but Smiths came across a forum on the topic of corticosteroid withdrawal. There, looking at the described symptoms, she realized that the thing they used for treating her son’s condition actually was the thing that was causing it in the first place.
His condition was actually a result of the side-effects of topical steroids and it was getting worse as you stop using them.
Smith was looking at different pictures of children with skin conditions like Isaiah’s. The symptoms were red raw skin, oozing and flaking off.
She stopped his treatment with steroids and turned towards a home remedy made of zinc and lemongrass. Step by step, things started improving.
In time, they noticed patches of clear skin.
Isaiah even used to walk to the kitchen island, where his parents kept the homemade balm and he used to point at the jar with the balm and then to his face; this means that he knew that this remedy soothes him. His mother was taking photos every day, nearly 50 a day, in order to see the progress, since the state could change moment to moment.
After ten months, Isaiah has completely clear skin.
Isaiah is like every toddler, babbling away, running everywhere and helping his mother around the house. He has a really sweet spirit. His mother sees the first year of his live as lost year, since she was not able to neither hold him nor kiss him.
Now, his family tries to make it up and thus they squeeze him all the time.
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