Moisturizer withdrawal: night 1

In my last post I said I was planning to do it in a few weeks. Well things have changed! This past week of partial MW has been brutal. I can't tell if I'm flaring bc I drank this past weekend or if my skin is reacting to the elimination of cerave & aquaphor (among other things). I've only used coconut oil and neosporin but have noticed that I'm basically withdrawing each time anyway because I let my skin get really dry, tight and painful before reapplying. At which point I scratch all the newly moisturized skin off and then it oozes, which is the worst. So what's the point?! I titled this post "night 1" instead of "day 1" because I already used coconut oil and neosporin today. It's been about 7 hours since my last application and already I'm feeling it. My hands and arms have a painful tingling that feels like it's coming directly from the nerve while my neck and face are just burning, tight, and all around painful. I've been sitting on my hands to relieve some of the pain and icing my neck/face as necessary. It's 11:30pm here and I'm not looking forward to the night ahead. I've been averaging a 5-6am fall asleep time. Not by choice, of course. I take my Atarax & unisom but they do nothing for me at this point.

I think last night was the final straw. Yesterday I had convinced myself to stop torturing myself and just put on the lotion to have some mobility. I rationalized this in my head by saying that I was going to do the moisturizer withdrawal soon anyway so may as well be comfortable in the meantime. Well I now realize that moisturizing does not in fact make me any more comfortable. I end up itching off any skin I had built up by letting my skin dry out. That resulted in me oozing uncontrollably for hours. I don't know about anyone else but for me, oozing is the absolute worst. I was sticking to my sheets and comforter, cursing myself for being so stupid. I ended up putting a towel over my pillow and an ice pack on the bare skin but then woke with lint from the towel in all my wounds. Cleaning that off was fun. So if I'm going to torture myself this way, I may as well do it for a positive outcome! And so here we are. Night 1. If you are a praying person, please send a prayer my way. I will certainly need it.

This was just a few hours after my last moisturizer application!