The unfortunate thing about skin allergies is that people feel embarrassed admitting about them in public, even to their relatives or parents. Most of the times, they try to hide it and wish it to go away without confronting them. Thankfully, my tryst with skin allergy and associated embarrassments came early to me as a kid and my parents were alert enough once they found out and had me treated appropriately.

When I was in Sixth Standard, I used to have this itching in between most of my fingers, near my elbows, on my feet, and at many other places. I used to hide those using papers, scratch them and when blood came out from those circular patches I used to wash it away with soap. I slept fully covered from head to toe even in hot summer, so as not to expose my skin. Other boys at my school used to tease me a bit and I started sitting in the last bench. I don’t think my studies were affected much, but my embarrassment was growing by the day. 

During those days, we used to stay with our grandparents and for every festival, like Vinayaka Chaturdhi, Dussehra or Deepawali, our whole family used to take Abhyangana Snana, being almost nude, massaging our bodies with oil and Sunni Pindi (A kind of facial pack, for which I don’t have an exact English Translation). On the day of Vijaya Dasami, I ran away from the bath and insisted that I be given a shampoo. That was when my father thought something was wrong. He caught hold of me and asked why I was misbehaving. He first saw the rashes near my fingers and soon realized why I was running away from the bath.

The next day, he came along with me to meet our headmaster and asked for a leave of a week. He also told the headmaster, that since I’m having a skin allergy, it would be better for me to be home while being treated, so that other kids will not get affected.  I was a happy kid that day to have a week off and walked back gladly towards a hospital next to my home.

The doctor was an elderly man in his late fifties, and he immediately recognized the allergy I was suffering with. He called it chidumu(another Telugu word, I didn’t find a translation for). He asked me how long was I suffering. I did not answer him immediately and that was when he started his long monologue about how there was no need to be embarrassed, and the sooner we confront it the better and delaying or hiding it could only worsen it and let the rashes spread across the entire body. He narrated a couple of cases where the kids hid their condition making it difficult for the skin to recuperate entirely. Hearing about others’ cases and his own experiences as a kid made me realize how stupid I was. 

The treatment was a bit painful and took more than a week, but I was happy at the end of it. My skin was clean, and I was not scratching at my fingers or toes anymore after every 5 minutes. I started sitting in the first bench again. When Diwali came 20 days later, I was the first one to go for the bath, which pleased my whole family


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