Thursday Thankfulness

Cranberry juice!  I am SO thankful for cranberry juice, you wouldn’t believe!  But I’m going to tell you anyway.

See, I thought I’d developed a bad case of dry skin after I stopped nursing a couple of years ago.  Scaly, flaky patches that drove me crazy.  They’d itch and I felt … let’s just say yucky and leave it at that, shall we?  I tried lotions galore, hoping to alleviate the condition.  I even switched to a dry skin soap for my face, hoping that would help.

It didn’t.

Then I noticed I seemed to be losing an unusual amount of hair.  Darc made fun of “the Wookie on the floor,” but still, it was kind of unnerving.  If you knew how vain I am about my hair, you’d understand the horror that was growing inside me.  I thought maybe it was hormones – the MiniNess was a late baby, I nursed her a long time, maybe those chemicals were really going wonky.  I grabbed a ton of books from the library about early onset menopause.  My personal nightmare.  I went through all those books and you know what I found?  I didn’t have a blessed symptom.  Whew!

Uh-oh.  What if it’s like … cancer … or something?  Like cancer of the pituitary, or thyroid, or adrenal glands?  Or ovaries? 

Oh that’ll make one go into a tailspin. 

Then, I got a small flash of recurrence of a condition on my hand that I thought I’d taken care of years ago.  See, I used to get this thing, where my hands would swell up and get all itchy, they’d get red and then blister, like air blisters, then the skin would peel off my palms and what was left would get all dry and hard and painful.  It wasn’t affected by seasons, or detergents or anything like that.  People would suggest “contact dermatitis” but that didn’t fit my symptoms.  Because it itched so bad, one time I decided to just use an anti-fungal cream on my hands and lo and behold, they got better.  That was at least 12-15 years ago and I never had another recurrence. 

Until recently.  It wasn’t too bad but still, I started doing some research, now that there is such a thing as the Internet and I can do that sort of thing.

I first did a search on what’s commonly known as athlete’s foot, and ringworm, since that’s a fungal infection and anti-fungal cream cured me last time.  Didn’t fit my symptoms at all.  I went on to other fungal infections and right away, yeast came up.

Now, it wasn’t like that.  Everyone hears “yeast infection” and right away their mind jumps to something that pertains to women, but that wasn’t the case with me.  Just a TMI FYI.  Anyway.

Candida (yeast) infections can take tons of forms, including hands, face, elbows, knees, toes, scalp … anywhere you have skin is susceptible to getting a yeast infection.  The yeast lives on the fatty acids of the body, especially those produced from Omega 6 fatty acids, and the flaking and scaling and itching are symptoms.  So is hair loss if the infection is on the scalp.  It looks like a bad case of dandruff but it’s not.  How gross does that sound?  How gross did I feel? 

This is what I learned:

• You can kill a dandruff yeast infection by leaving Head & Shoulders or Selsun Blue on your head overnight.
• Taking Omega 3 capsules will counteract the effects of too many Omega 6 fatty acids in the body and help get rid of a yeast infection by depriving it of its “food” source
• Cranberry juice has properties that kill off yeast infections

Long story short, my skin is almost back to what it was in high school.  No more itchies, no more flakies, no more scalies.  And my hair seems to have slowed its falling out process and I’ve noticed some new stuff growing in where it was getting thin.  Now, it took at least 2 weeks before I started noticing any improvements, and another 2-4 weeks before I felt like I’d beaten it.  Yeast is stubborn and it almost feels like it fights back. 

So if you think you are dealing with dry skin, try drinking a glass of cranberry juice every day for a month, see what happens. 

I think I’ll drink a glass every day for the rest of my life, I am so thankful for it.  And it helps with lots of other things too, apparently.  It seems to have great immunity and medical properties.  One of those wonder foods, like honey.  🙂

Cranberry juice, my thankful for the week.  Heck, for the entire year!

So what’s your gratitude thing this week?

Check out my husband’s latest book, available for download!

A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon US (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Amazon UK (Kindle version) A Fine Cast of Characters on Smashwords (non-Kindle versions)

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