I’m not sure entirely what I’ll get [sighs]. The GP mainly said he’ll try and set up an appointment for me to see a dermatologist locally. And I would imagine what, going through it, what we’ll end up discussing are the effects of psoriasis and how, and the different methods that can be taken in order to help treat the psoriasis.

Yeah. Is that something that you there are other treatments that your GP can’t prescribe you that you hope the dermatologist might?

I have had heard things through the grapevine through friends that you can, which is a steroids, and you inject them straight into the psoriasis and it’s supposed to clear it right up. Now, steroids are a big part of psoriasis treatment. Like, for example, Dovabet and Betnovate, they both have quite a few steroids which means that essentially you can only put them in very certain parts of the skin. Otherwise what happens is that skin will start to thin out. So it means that you have to be very careful about what you’re applying, and where you’re applying it, even if it looks like that it’s working.

When I was first diagnosed there was a very long waiting time for it. For the NHS appointment. And so, my mam and dad decided to get me an appointment privately, because that meant I could be referred within like two weeks. I’d already waited a long time, cos I’d been back and forth to the GP. And mam and dad must have spent so much money those first few years, because we had like private appointments. And we don’t have private insurance or anything like that. It was just like the private appointments, so they were very expensive. But I suppose that’s a testament to how much they cared and how much they wanted me to get my treatment straight away. And I really, really appreciate them doing that. But it’s difficult to keep up with a long term condition like that you can’t. Unless you can afford it, you can’t have, you know, private appointments all the time. When I was first diagnosed, they did that cos they wanted to get the treatments going. And so, yeah, sometimes the waiting times can be frustrating. It’s often three months waiting time, I think; sometimes longer. And it’s frustrating, cos I’ll go to the GP, cos my skin’s really bad and they’ll say, Yeah, I’ll refer you, but then it’ll be another four months.

So, like that is a frustrating aspect of it. But then again, like I say, I understand how busy dermatologists are and the health care system is. And so I’m not sort of angry at the wait.

Is it at 18 that you’ll probably be referred onto the adult dermatologist?

Yeah.

Yeah. Have they sort of talked about what the differenced might be with adult dermatology?

Not really because whenever I go it’s with my parents, and because I’ve had it from such an early age, they’ve always dealt with the creams and the prescriptions and the treatment and everything like that. And I’ve just like been there as the person who needs the help with it. So I think I do really need to get-, start getting into like knowing more about it myself and like knowing what my treatments are and like maybe even going to the appointments by myself to-, cos otherwise it will just be my mum talking to the dermatologist rather than actually me and my experience talking-, talking to him.

When I was younger I, well I suppose when I was younger and older it felt kind of awkward – I suppose that I didn’t, when I was younger I didn’t totally understand why they were taking photos and why there were so many people, but I hadn’t had a great experience of hospitals so. When I was older I went to we used to get called in for like there used to be a regional or whatever and people come from all different hospitals and then they’d just people there would take photos and ask some questions that was, that was quite stressful and it was also quite annoying because I used to waste a lot of time at hospitals and in the back of my mind I always knew that whatever they came up with wasn’t going to change anything. But yeh.

Why do you think you thought that it wouldn’t change anything?

Cos you know when I started going to these, you know, I’d been there, I went to them about 12 to 14 years old and nothing had changed yet and I didn’t see why a doctor from Newcastle was going to come up from any, come up with anything different from the doctor from Oxford so.

So a friend of mine raves over the Aveeno cream, which is like oat-y. And I remembered like when I first started, in fact it’s just come back to me, when I first started that oats were a thing and someone was like, Put oats in tights and like put them, wrap them round. And I was like, Really? I did it, it didn’t help. And this friend raved over the Aveeno cream. She was like, Oh, I’ll bring it when I see you, you can try it. I was like, This is bloody awful, like, y’know. It’s not doing it for me. And funnily, at the hospital last week I got given a load of little like test pots. And I think if you can get hold of them, it’s really good. Our, my dermatology department are fantastic. They’ll let you, photo therapy nurses will let you just, they’ve got a cupboard and it’s like, Help yourself to the cupboard. Try what you like. And that’s quite good, cos you can then try something. As it happened, a pot of the Aveeno stuff came in. It was a little one, came in this thing. And I actually quite liked it on my hands. And I was like, Okay, well maybe we won’t use it on all of me, but as a hand thing we’ll bear it in mind.

I think also, for me, a lot of it is what comes in like a handy sized packet that you can hide somewhere. Got one in the car.

Cos the first time it was more like we think it’s psoriasis, we think you should try this if it doesn’t work come back again and we’ll try something else. And then the second time I went back, in my head thinking I know what I want, I know what I need and the doctor more or less agreed, I didn’t sort of say I need this cream but I explained that it had worked before and they said well if it worked before it’s probably going to work again but if it doesn’t, then we’ll come back. And yeh that’s basically where I am at the moment so it has worked so I haven’t gone back. So in terms of other treatments or therapies I’ve not tried any and I don’t really know any others but it’s been treated as a kind of as and when you need it.

Yeah, so it was- [sigh] my dermatologist effectively told me that he didn’t know when it would go away. So he said, “I’ve given you all of these things to do, you’re doing all the right things; however the nature of psoriasis is that I just don’t know when it’ll go away. So, all you can do is just keep doing what you’re doing, and hope for the best.” Which isn’t the best sort of prognosis that you can be given. He said, “It may last-, it may last days, it may last weeks, it may last months, it may not go away. Hopefully it’ll calm down, but you might have-, you might have this for pretty much indefinitely.” Which was quite a scary thing to hear because at the time it was really bad. And if it had calmed down and stayed, that would have been okay, but if it had stayed as bad as it was and not really gone away, that would’ve-, that was quite scary, yeah. I didn’t-, I didn’t particularly want that to happen. So I think in hindsight I was relatively lucky, because I was given a sort of hopefully it’ll go down in the next few months’ prognosis. And it went away probably within a few weeks. Other than odd bits on my arms and my knees, everything was sort of calmed down relatively quickly. I say relatively, it was about a month, yeah. A month, six weeks.