Diana and her pink cheeks.

There must be something in the air, because I've been having an overwhelming urge to completely redesign my website. I'm not sure what I want to change about it, but I want it to look...I dunno...more professional. There are several journals that I read besides the ones in the NotAWebring, and a few of those have revamped recently. And of course Ron Collins has a superb site, crisp and clean and extremely classy-looking. I don't know diddly-jack about the more esoteric elements of web design though. I fake it, basically, coding from scratch in WordPad with dorky ole HTML. I don't know Java or Perl, or DHTML or any of the other nifty-cool-whiz-bang things that make up the super-neato websites. And, to be honest, I'm not sure I really want to sit down and learn all of that stuff, since all I'm going to do with it is do my own website.

But I am itching for a different look. This may require some thought.

I have Rosacea.

I've known...or rather, I've suspected for quite some time. I first got an inkling that there was something wrong back in the late spring of this year when my mother commented on how my face was sunburned--when I hadn't been out in the sun in a while. But I still didn't think much of it. Sometimes faces get red, or maybe I had been out in the sun and just hadn't realized that I'd been burned. Or maybe it was all the exercising I was doing. It would go away.

But it didn't. It slowly got worse, and more pronounced, and I battled the redness with makeup and cover-stick. It persisted through Clarion, and I began to think that maybe I did have Rosacea. I'm still not sure where I first heard of it--maybe an ad, or maybe conversation. But it certainly wasn't going away on its own, and more and more people began to ask me why I was blushing, or comment on my "pink cheeks." I became intensely self-conscious of my face, and manic about make-up. When I returned home after Clarion I intended to immediately go find a dermatologist and see what could be done about it. But to my dismay, our insurance company had gone bankrupt in my absence, and I was forced to wait until October for new coverage. My face got redder, and I began having to deal with the acne-like lesions that sometimes accompany Rosacea.

We finally got our new insurance at the beginning of October, and I was able to make an appointment with a dermatologist, though I was somewhat distressed to find that every dermatologist I called had a nearly full patient load, and the soonest I'd be able to get an appointment was late October.

When I eventually made it in to see the doctor it was almost anticlimactic. She asked me what the trouble was, and I replied, "I think I have Rosacea." She gave a firm nod, and said, "Yes, you most certainly do." And then she proceeded to write me out prescriptions for oral antibiotics, and Metrogel, the standard treatment for Rosacea. My doctor warned me that it might take months before I saw any improvement, but to my intense delight and relief, I saw visible lessening of the redness in just over a week. It's been almost eight weeks now since I began treatment, and I'm almost comfortable enough to go out without makeup.

No one knows what causes Rosacea, and there's no cure for it--all that can be done is to treat the symptoms. There are a number of factors that can trigger a flare-up of Rosacea; I'm fairly certain that the high levels of stress that I was going through this spring were a factor in my case. Or perhaps it was the trips to the beach, or the heavy exercise. It's tough to say, and I'm still slowly working on figuring out what my personal triggers are for flare-ups. I'm intensely grateful that coffee is not one for me. I'm not sure I could live in a world without coffee.

I was reluctant to mention it in this journal for a very long time. Purely ego, I'm not ashamed to admit. Rosacea makes one ugly and unattractive, or at least it seems that way to the sufferer. After the fifteenth time someone asks you why you're blushing, you want to crawl under a rock. I think I'm only comfortable talking about it now because it is coming under control. I'm not in remission, but I'm hoping that I get there someday.

Anyway, if you think you might have it, or know someone who might, check out the National Rosacea Society's website.