Formication and hallucinations - when shit gets real

It's been a while since I posted and for that I apologize.  Have had a lot of changes in my life recently and I also went to spend some time with my family in Colorado.  I will be writing an update soon.  For now here's some harm reduction information on a topic that is very personal for me.  It might not apply to you but it does for a lot of people.  Copy pasted from a comment form on some wiki site...

Speed bugs, picking, and formication

"awesome.  I just wrote like three paragraphs and the stupid site randomly refreshed and deleted it.  AAAARGH.  let me try this again writing in notepad so i don't lose my comment again.  

 I could write a book about this stuff.

I used to have a really bad problem picking my skin when I used drugs.  I was an active heroin addict for 8 years, started doing coke 2 years after the H, then used meth for the first time 5 years in, and had a triple habit shooting heroin and meth every day and also smoking crack for 3 years on and off.  I picked the hell out of my skin the very first time i used meth, I also pulled out so much of my hair that i had a huge bald spot in the back of my head and had to shave all my hair off.  At first it was the meth that made me pick but eventually i would pick whenever I got high on any kind of drug even downers like heroin and benzos.  It's a really terrible cycle.  In addition to picking I was diagnosed with something called 'trichotylomania' which means to pull out your hair.  Picking is sometimes serious enough to be diagnosed as 'dermatilomania' aka pulling / picking at skin compulsively. Dermis = skin, mania = insanity / compulsion. I could spend an entire 24 hours sitting on my floor or standing in front of my mirror picking at my skin or pulling out my hair. It was very common for the sun to come up on me while I sat in the same spot picking, having started doing it the night or even day before. I would pick with my fingernails, tweezers (always had a pair on me and i owned like 20 different pairs), syringes, razor blades, exacto knives, a metal 'skin care tool' that has a hole on one end that you drag across pimples to pop them out, sewing needles, pocket knives, and all sorts of sharp metal things.  Sometimes I would pick so bad it would look like i had road rash on my face from a car accident.  i would also pluck out my eyebrows (every single hair) my arm  and leg hairs and even my pubes.  When I would pull / pluck out hairs it was because they would sometimes have these clear or white 'gel' looking tubes either attached to the hair root or stuck in the pore / follicle itself, these would pop out after i plucked a hair out.  When I picked it was because I saw little white worm looking things and black specks coming out of my pores.  I would collect these 'bugs' / 'parasites' and stick them to pieces of notebook paper as proof of my 'infestation'.  When I got sober I threw out like three whole notebooks full of this crap.  It's a really disgusting and scary habit.  Once I started nothing could stop me, i would only stop when my fingers hurt too much to keep going or my hands would cramp up.  I was terribly ashamed of doing it but I couldn't control myself.  I would do it in front of my friends and even in public, if someone asked me to stop I would get mad and do it more frantically.  Most of the time I honestly believed that there were bugs in my skin and I didn't connect it to the drugs.  I thought I had morgellons, or scabies, or bird mites, or some kind of nanotechnology virus engineered by the government to drive me insane.  My mind would play weird tricks on me while I picked.  i would think i was playing a game that someone had invented to test me and the object was to collect as many 'bugs' as possible in my notebook, or that if i collected enough 'specimens' i would make money off of them somehow, or take them to a doctor and help discover a new disease.  I would often see them moving under my skin or outside of it, sometimes I could feel them biting me or hear them make hissing noises.  Weird crazy SCARY shit that made no sense. 

I once got MRSA so bad from picking that I was told at the ER that i was days away from dying of sepsis.  I had to be held for three days and given tons of oral and IV antibiotics and had to take special showers several times a day.  Staph is common with pickers because it lives under your fingernails.  You could also get cellulitis, blood poisoning, necrotizing fasciitis (flesh eating virus) and all kinds of terrible infections. to this day i am covered in scars.  They are the worst on my arms and legs, they have gotten a lot better since I stopped picking obviously but in the right kind of light, when it's cold, or when I get a sun burn you can see that every inch of my arms are covered in overlapping scars.  There are scars from when i cut myself as a teenager, years worth of track marks, abcess scars, and layer upon layer of picking scars.  my nose is always red from times when i picked all of the skin off it trying to get rid of 'blackheads' and 'clogged pores', kids in my hometown sometimes make fun of me by calling me 'Rudolph' which is extremely embarassing.  The scars will never go away, but they do get less and less noticeable as time goes on, thank god.

The stuff that you see happening to your skin is going on for a reason.  One reason is that you are hallucinating.  Meth and other stimulants make you hyper focus on things and make you want to do something repetetive or detail oriented.  They also cause sometimes subtle and sometimes very vivid visual and auditory hallucinations.  I have been locked in my second story apartment and heard dozens of people in the street whispering about me.  i once heard someone climbing the wall outside my window and thought i heard them trying to open my window, I have heard people pounding on my door trying to break it down, I have walked down the street in San Francisco and literally every single person on the street was talking about me.  I have been chased by cars, people on bikes, and worst of all 'shadow people' *shiver* I once pulled a two inch long black worm out of my armpit.  The scary part about that one is that I put the 'worm' in a drawer and it was still there the next day and I showed it to some sober friends and they were freaked out by it and couldn't tell what it was.  Looking back on it i think it was probably a long strip of skin and dried blood, but it came out of my armpit when i was picking, kind of popped out of a hair follicle, when it popped out I was so shocked by how long it was that I screamed and started to cry.  Meth causes psychosis, it is very seriously damaging to your mental functions, it is no joke. So anyways, if you are hyper flocused on your skin, seeing things that are not real on or in your skin, and compelled to do something repetetive; that is the neurotic and insane combination that leads to picking.  There is also formication and delusional parasitosis that occurs when you use stimulants.  

Here are some methods i have found useful to heal and repair skin as much as possible after really bad picking episodes.  First of all it is essential that you wash the skin as much as you can.  It will hurt but you have to do it.  I suggest using 'Hibiclens', this is an anti bacterial soap that really works wonders to prevent and treat skin infections and it is very gentle on the skin, just try not to get it in your eyes!  Pour a decent ammount of hibiclens on a washcloth and gently wash your skin.  Use it instead of body wash in the shower.  When I had MRSA and sepsis Hibiclens is what the doctors had me wash my skin with at the Denver hospital i was staying in.  You can buy hibiclens at Walgreens, duane reed, safeway, etc.  Another product that works really well is called 'Prid', it is a homeopathic 'drawing salve' for abcesses and infections that have pus or bacteria in them.  You put a huge glob of it on the wound and cover it with a non stick gauze pad and tape it up.  I have put Prid on abcesses before, left it under gauze overnight, and in the morning the abcess had drained and was almost completely healed.  I have given a container of Prid to several of my actively using friends and many of them have healed their own abcesses using it.  Prid is really an amazing product and it is one of the essential things I always kept around when i used to pick. Prid and Hibiclens are your first line of defense against serious skin infections, both of these products can be bought at Cvs, walgreens, rite aid, etc.  some holistic products that work really well are cold pressed Neem oil for topical use (it smells bad but works wonders) and Colloidal Silver for topical and oral use.  Many people who suffer from Morgellons swear by Colloidal Silver.  You can get Colloidal Silver at whole foods and gNC but i buy mine online because there are alot of fake and low quality CSilver products out there.  Nutrasilver is a good online version.  Colloidal oatmeal and lavender bath soaks for eczema are great. Tea Tree oil is anti-parasitic and anti bacterial but should not be used in deep open wounds.  You can buy diatomaceous earth 'clay' which is good for topical use on abcesses that have not opened yet or started draining.  the diatomaceous clay works like a drawing salve and will bring the abcess to a head.  For healing I use neutrogeena naturals moisturizer and Aveeno excema therapy lotion.  Bathing or soaking your skin with lavender epsom salts can help reduce itching and irritation but is not good if you have a lot of deep open wounds.  Lavender oils and lotions provide a lot of relief for pain and itching as does Dr. Bronners lavender soap.  Grape seed oil and grape seed capsules are amazing to heal and soothe wounds from picking and to fight infection.  Milk Thistle capsules are good for your skins healing when taken orally once a day.  Grape juice is good to flush the toxins out of your system as is cranberry juice.  Try mixing sea salt and lemon juice and soaking your skin.  Swallowing a clove of garlic like a pill once a day or just eating a lot of garlic in your food will flush toxins out of your system and fight bacterial infections.  Swallowing a pinch of cayenne pepper in water is also good to detoxify your body.  Drink alot of water.  Soak in a warm bath.  Wash your face with a warm wet washcloth and lots of soap, Hibiclens or something for sensitive skin like cetaphil or a kind of soap without harsh dyes and scents in it, then lay on a thick coat of moisturizer and sleep with it on so it can sink into and condition your skin.  Steam and heat will reduce swelling and pain.  Cucumbers laid on the skin will reduce swelling, soothe, and provide relief.  Cut a potato in half and place it over a pimple, bump, ingrown hair, or abcess and it will draw the poison out of your skin.  These are just some methods that I have used and found to be very effective.  Do a search for morgellons and eczema home remedies and you will find a lot of other things that will work for healing wounds caused by picking.

Lastly i just want to say that if you are tired of being at the mercy of your addiction maybe it is time for you to seek help to get sober.  I was about as bad as it gets with my addictions and i am currently in therapy and AA and things are getting better slowly but surely.  It is important to have a support system if you want to get clean and sober, nobody can do it all by themselves.  NA, AA, SMART recovery, and Life ring are all support groups that will help you work towards a drug free life.  Reach out to somebody else who has been through it to hear their experience, strength, and hope.  You can recover, people do it every day, you just have to want it and do whatever it takes to change your life.  I sincerely wish you all the best of luck and happiness no matter what you decide to do moving forward.  Take care of yourselves and try not to hurt yourselves.  Your health is very important and you are worth taking care of, don't let society and stigma about drug use make you feel worthless.  Do some research on harm reduction to learn how to use drugs in a safer and less destructive way.

http://zenithchasing.blogspot.com >>> This is my blog about my recovery if you want to learn more about what i am doing to change my life and try to live without drugs and alcohol and also to heal from the painful events in my past both drug related and not.  If you need someone to talk to please know that i am always here to listen and offer whatever advice that I can.  Good luck, take care, stay strong, and stay blessed. <3"

- Zenith Chasing