Dealing With Baby Eczema

By Bal Kang

Our daughter, now three, has had eczema since birth but you wouldn't suspect just by looking at her, how bad her eczema was. Ok, she's got a few areas of dry skin around her wrists and ankles but that's the only clues she exhibits on her body.

When she was born me and my husband first noticed a small red patch above one eye, which to be honest we thought was just a birthmark, but when we checked with the health visitor, we were told it was in fact eczema. So that's how our journey began into trying to find out the best course of action and products, as well as how best we could help our daughter.

Our first port of call was the doctor. After trying several recommended products, we were referred to our local hospital, where we went to see a dermatologist. I would take my daughter every couple of weeks and try various creams.

My daughter's eczema was quite bad, she would scratch her poor little body so much that it would start to bleed and then become infected, this in turn meant she would be on antibiotics and steroid creams on a continuous basis. I, like any other parent would worry the affect the antibiotics and steroid cream would have on her, surely the antibiotics must be affecting her immune system in some way and then the added problem of the steroid creams which thinned out her skin.

As a 'first-time' parent, dealing with eczema is tough and no parent wants to see their child suffer. The hardest part is not being able to help your child at all, especially when they start to scratch and there's nothing that can be done to relieve their pain. Knowing this used to make me feel utterly useless and depressed!

To stop the scratching at night, we tried putting a pair of socks on my daughter's hands, but this was not such a great idea as it meant she would rub her face with the sock covered hand, throughout the night and by the morning her face was very red and painfully sore.

Then we thought maybe the air in the room was maybe too dry and this was probably causing her eczema to become inflamed. We put a humidifier in the room to help put the moisture back in the air in her room, but again this was something else that we could 'knock on the head' as it didn't suit our daughter. In fact I'm sure it made things worse for her.

Other parents do not appreciate how difficult it is bringing up a child who suffers with eczema. For one they don't sleep at night and have no sleep pattern at all. I got fed up with other parents boasting about how well their child sleeps throughout the night.

They should swap places with me and then they would appreciate the bags under my eyes and how tired I looked every day. The worse thing about sleepless nights was the irritability it caused, which would result in me simply shouting at my daughter. This in turn would make me feel guilty later, thinking about my poor innocent baby and how it wasn't her fault.

There would be times when no matter what I did, I just couldn't help her and I would think this was my fault. Other times I'd go through stages where I would just sit there and cry with my daughter.

Trial and Error

The next few months involved a journey of trial and error, whereby we tried different things to see whether these could help my daughters eczema. We tried the following,

Food tolerance testing

Some of these seemed to reduce the eczema and some didn't but I think it was important to try different things. As they not only gave us hope but maybe they helped reduce the eczema our daughter suffers now to minimal levels. More information is available from the Baby Eczema Help website set up by us to provide hope to other parents who are in same situation as us.

Bal Kang is a mother to a three year old daughter, who had severe eczema. Today the eczema as all but disappeared after Bal spent many months trying various methods to help reduce the eczema and the pain it causes.

Bal Kang Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bal_Kang

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