Mummy

As Rapunzel's skin flares, her itch gets more intense.  Which means she tries to scratch, scratch, scratch.  Which can (and has) lead to skin infections.  People with eczema tend to harbor more bacteria on their skin in general, so when the skin barrier is broken, it's much more likely to get infected.  During the day, we can try to deter her from scratching.  But she does most of her scratching while she's asleep at night.  One of the things we recently found that helps, is wrapping her arms and legs at night.  After she has soaked, and we've applied her ointments, we wrap her up mummy-style with bandages and tape.  I ordered a huge box of different colored bandage tape online and she likes picking which color mummy she'll be each night.  We wrap her from the hip to toe, and the shoulder to fingertip.  This helps keep her from scratching her arms and legs during the night (she can still scratch, but can't get to the skin to break that skin barrier).  It's helps a lot to let her skin heal from an infection and to help keep it from getting infected again.  If her skin is trying to heal, I'll even wrap her on days when we're going to be at home all day.  It takes about an hour each night for her to soak, apply ointment, wrap her arms and legs, get dressed, take meds, brush teeth and hair and get into bed.  It's takes slightly less time each morning that I don't have to wrap her.

Here you can see her hands wrapped this morning, as she's playing on the iPad (she embraces the bed head).  She had an eczema flare yesterday and is still recovering from it today.  She scratched so much last night that she was able to rip part of her bandages away on her upper thighs, forearms, and hands, leaving open wounds.  (When I wrap her at night, I wrap her thumb up with her hands so that she has even less mobility with it to scratch, but during the day, I leave her thumb out so that she can use her hands for daily activities).  So today, I've had to apply antibiotic ointment to her wounds and wrap her again.  She'll spend most of the day at my side, so that I can help deter her from scratching more.  It also means that most of her schoolwork will be adjusted since she can't grip a pencil to do much writing with the wrap on her hands.  So any work she does today will be either on the iPad or oral.  It's days like today that I'm so thankful we homeschool.  I honestly don't know how on earth I'd be able to keep up with her skin care if I had to send her off to school each day.