‘You’re looking fabulous.’; ‘You’re looking so well.’; ‘Great to see you looking better.’; ‘Your skin looks amazing.’

You’d think that hearing these words would make me happy.  In the past, they did.  Now, not so much.  It’s not that I don’t appreciate the intended kindness, because I do.  However, in my case, the tightening of my skin is far from a desired feature of my physical being.  Wait, what?  What did Emma just say?  Do you know how much money people pay to achieve the look that Emma is slowly gaining, naturally?

The skin on my legs, particularly on the stretch below my knees, is so tight that it has a shiny and young appearance, like I’ve been well moisturized.  My legs themselves are swollen when they get even slightly too hot or too cold, making my otherwise scrawny limbs look marginally better from the illusion of there being a bit more muscle on my calves and quads.  My face is losing those lines I gained from life and a longstanding period of another autoimmune disease (Neuro-Behcets) that has intermittently run me physically ragged for over twenty years (I won’t get into those details now).  In fact, most of the skin on my body appears younger.  I don’t need the airbrush to erase the wrinkles.

Don’t be fooled.  You can still tell I’m in my forties, or as one teenager told me six months ago, ‘You’re like fiftaaay!’  No, that would be my husband! (Though he doesn’t look fiftaaay either!) Unfortunately, the disease I have developed does not lift the fleshy parts that one would want lifted, which is a dead giveaway to one’s age.  My age, however, is not the point.

If you look closely at my hands and my feet, you will see that the skin has tightened so much that cracks have formed on the tips of my toes, heels and fingers, resulting in digital ulcers that appear faster than it takes to prevent them.  Digital infarction is a bitch!  All that’s needed is a simple graze of one’s nail, a mosquito bite, a soft bump, the smallest of burns, the opening of a water bottle, and a painful ulcer appears.  As for the younger looking legs.  When you take a closer look, you will see the variation in the colours of said skin.  If you focus on my mouth, the furrowing that started a little over a year ago has worsened.  Ask me to go ‘Aaaaaah,’ like a dentist or doctor asks, and my proverbial big mouth only opens 2 inches wide.  Oh, the irony for someone as talkative as I am!

I am physically uncomfortable most of the time – my skin, my muscles, my hips, my hands, my feet, my face.  My small blood vessels are damaged and I am producing way more collagen than I should.  However, I do believe that I inherited some seriously happy hormones from my parents, because the discomfort never brings me down for even as long as one day.  That said, I would still take feeling good and being healthy over looking good, any day of the year.  You see, what’s happening on the outside of my body is also happening on the inside.  I have systemic scleroderma, otherwise known as the disease that turns you to stone.