Athlete's foot led to Pompholyx

I got athlete's foot for the first time in my life (I'd just turned 40). I recognised it as my brother used to get it as a child. It was a little itchy, literally on a couple of my smaller toes on one foot. I used athlete's foot cream to no avail.

Soon blisters started forming. They started spreading across my foot. After several doc's appointments it was eventually diagnosed as Pompholyx. But by this time I had hundreds of blisters on the bottom of both feet and loads on the palms of my hands. Everywhere I walked it was so painful and even picking up a bar of soap hurt my hands. Not that the corners were sharp but they felt like they were cutting me. It was often enough to bring me to tears.

I was prescribed a thick yellow cream which was totally useless and extremely impractical. I'm an office worker and everything I touched got covered in this rough gook. I was prescribed a white more absorbent cream and told not to wash my hands and feet as often as it was probably making things worse.

The whole thing happened about 5 yrs ago so I can't really remember everything. Except that the experience was long and protracted and horrendous to live with. Certainly it went on for months. The doc told me that my own immune system had kicked in to cure the athlete's foot and that I was allergic to my own antibodies. There you go.

One thing I can remember at the time was that I couldn't find images on the web to self-diagnose so here are 3 of my own. There's a pic of my hand while it's 'raging'. I know it doesn't look like it could be the bane of my life but it was so painful and frustrating. And a pic as it was almost cleared up - no pain at this stage.

There's also a pic of the worst affected foot as it began to clear. It was so gross as you can see. Unusually, before this happened, I had the smoothest feet. Not a single line on the soles of my feet. As you can see, it left my foot with lots of lines (I suppose comparable with my age). The lines on my hands were always very faint and they became a little more prominent.

It appeared to me that too much skin was being produced. It was a very weird experience for me - but to give you some comfort (touch wood), neither the Pompholyx that ravaged my foot nor the athlete's foot, have retuned. So hopefully a lot of you will only be affected once too. Anyway at very least you can see some images.

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