Luca’s story
Hello everyone! My name is Luca, and I’m 23 years old. I live in Veneto, in the Po Valley, a very polluted area. Since I was a child, I started to fight with atopic dermatitis and with life. I was seven months old when no one knew exactly what triggered it, and the first skin lesions appeared. Then I started travelling around Italy to different hospitals, and every doctor who visited me proposed a miracle cure. I remember that a “magic” cure messed up my immune system to such an extent that it caused me a very extensive herpes zoster. The years went by, and I was visited first in Genoa, then in Brescia for genetic research, but there too nothing.
The big problem is my very high IgE (a blood value that makes you hypersensitive to everything). On medical advice, for as long as I can remember, I have always carried adrenaline with me and lots and lots of cortisone. In the meantime, the dermatitis had spread to the inside of my ears and private parts. It was torture to do everything, even showering: when your skin was injured, water burned, and I had sores and lesions all over my body. And then eating. I ate only apples, potatoes and rabbit meat for a long time. Even the normal activities that most children and teenagers happily do, like going to school or going out with friends, were a source of pain for me, psychologically, this time. At school, I was the leper to be mocked and kept away. My experience has taught me that the stigmatisation that people with severe atopic dermatitis suffer is largely due to the lack of knowledge of the disease by ordinary people. Atopic dermatitis is not infectious. Yet once, to get me to take part in a swimming course in the pool, my mother had to bring a doctor’s certificate attesting that the disease that was inflicted on my skin was not transmittable.
By now, having reached the point of exasperation, in 2006 (I was 12 years old), with an IgE of 84 thousand, my parents and I went to Misurina, where there is a centre for treating asthma and allergies. In the mountains, at high altitudes, allergens are less active. I lived there alone, in a boarding school, from September to June during the school year for five years.
There, the disease improved, perhaps thanks to the cleaner air; they also treated me with cyclosporine, a powerful drug that suppresses the immune response, and the dermatitis was somewhat under control. But I can assure you that separating from the family and the real world was difficult. Life in Misurina is protected, muffled. Conversely, around the age of 17, when I returned home, I found myself in the sad reality: if people remember you as ugly and a loser, you remain ugly and a loser. My illness has made me insecure in facing the new obstacles of life, both for me and for my family, who have had to face many expenses for medicines and not only. Emollient creams and ointments are essential for us who have dermatitis, and we do not need them to make ourselves beautiful but to give our skin, always dry and red, a little relief. All these products, which you can find in the pharmacy next to lotions and ointments “against wrinkles and skin blemishes”, are entirely paid for by the patient and are expensive. When finding a job or at an interview with a new recruiter, environments that are too dusty or hot still cause me redness and itching. Still, even the employer, not knowing my pathology, is surprised and does not consider me.
So if finally someone helps us and is interested in atopic dermatitis, not just with words, I say THANK YOU.
Gio’s story
My relationship with Asthma is very particular
I have always had a passion for cycling; I raced with a competitive card. I was an athlete and felt fit. Then, one day, at work, I started sneezing all the time; the next morning, I even had trouble breathing. I was 44 years old, and from there, my ordeal began, which, over the years, led me to get worse and worse.
Between several hospitalisations, even long ones, night calls to the emergency doctor and two anaphylactic shocks, the doctors’ response was always the same: bronchial asthma. But the medicines they gave me had no effect. Then, in 2017, the turning point finally arrived. I was included in the program of an experimental biological therapy for Severe Asthma, and from there, after some initial difficulties, I started to have great improvements. In the meantime, I also retired, which helped me because I no longer breathed in the dust from my work as a bricklayer.
Today, I lead a regular life without any particular excesses, but at least I can indulge in whims I had to give up. Thanks to a nutritionist, I also lost weight and am now back on my bike. I can also do 10 without problems. I have an incredible benefit and the satisfaction of not being left behind when I cycle with friends. I can go for my walks again, and sometimes I even stay 4 hours in the woods picking mushrooms. Every morning, I take care of my piece of land, surrounded by nature and plants, without worrying and breathing in that good air that I had no longer been able to breathe.
My mood has also improved; I’m more positive. I’ve learned to fully enjoy life’s little pleasures because now that I’ve found them again, I hold on to them.