And could you tell me a bit about going to the doctor’s for both the rash but maybe acne as well?

For both the rash and the acne. Going to the doctors was, so we, for quite a while I think I tried to deal with it, you know, just by putting on creams and whatever with my mum’s help. And eventually we went to the doctor and got referred to a dermatologist who tried to treat both conditions but what happened? I went on antibiotics which didn’t really do much. I went on the pill, I think it might actually have been the pill that cleared the rash up. The problem was that the, there was a very long waiting list to see a dermatologist and when I moved away from home for university, the appointments got quite disrupted and in the end especially as none of the treatments they were advising for me seemed to be doing that much good with the exception of the pill which I went, eventually went off because I found I wasn’t agreeing with it in other ways. The treatments didn’t seem to be doing that much good and so I just ended up not actively organising any more dermatologist appointments and I’ve not been to a dermatologist now for about two years.

Yeah. I think it was like, it was definitely at the end of school or beginning of university, I can’t remember exactly, but it was definitely 18, 19 when I started to get sort of regular spots. You know, I didn’t have anything up until then really, so I guess it frustrated me a little bit because I thought I had passed that; that I’d been lucky to not have any spots really. And I guess I was frustrated because I felt like I’m not supposed to have it. I’m not-, it’s when-, you have spots when you’re a teenager. And I guess that when I-, sort of end of last year those sorts of thoughts definitely came back. I thought, ah, I’m 24′, you know, I’m an adult. Another thing is I work in a school and I work around-, often I work around a lot of sort of adolescent children. I felt like, I often felt like it was almost affecting my profess-, my being professional cos I felt like, you know, I’ve got spots, I look like the kids now and I’m meant to like be in charge of these kids.

But I didn’t really-, I probably only voiced that to my parents but I guess you do have those questions, questions to yourself like why do I have these spots, like I’m meant to be spot-free’ and I guess you feel like it’s affecting your-, I guess your age and your maturity in a way, like your perceived maturity and ability to look after these children.

This is really recently, I’d started using, like my mum got me some shower gel, some for Christmas, so I started using that. And then I started like after I was using it getting like, I don’t know, I thought it was kind of like a rash. But it was kind of, it reminded me of when I had acne. And I was getting it on like my chest. And I was like Oh, no, I’ll have to-‘ and I like, I went off it like straight away. And I think it was just some ingredient in it that my skin didn’t like. But then the rash went away. But I was like really worried then that kind of the acne was coming back. Cos at first I didn’t realise that it was the shower gel doing it. And I was like oh, my gosh, I’m getting acne on my chest again. And so that was pretty stressful. But when we figured out it was the shower gel and then I was like oh, that’s okay then.