Annie Lowry
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Annie Lowry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Itching, it's just a little bit like disrespected. You look like a dog with fleas. It's like embarrassing to scratch yourself in public. It's inappropriate to scratch yourself in public. I think people just kind of don't take it very seriously.
It is. I have been itchy for about four days now. So we're talking during the daytime, so I'm not terribly itchy. But my feet are itchy, my scalp is itchy, and my hands are itchy. But it's a two out of ten. It's manageable.
At its worst, it was like having poison ivy in the acute phase of poison ivy, although my skin didn't show anything. There was no rash or anything like that. And it was completely maddening. It was impossible to do anything other than focus on scratching or trying to find relief from the itching. And the type of itching that I have is not sensitive to the medications that we have that normally...
turn the itching dial down. So the two big ones being steroids and antihistamines. And it just became all encompassing. I would spend hours in cold baths. I would walk to try to get rid of the itch. It was most intense. I've been pregnant twice. I have two kids. And at the end of one pregnancy, I asked my surgeons, I was like, if this doesn't stop, I don't want these limbs on my body anymore.
It was really debilitating. And I'm not like that all the time. And in fact, the itching has never been quite as severe as it was in my pregnancies. Now the itching is much calmer, although it is persistent. But it comes and goes. At its worst, it's really, you know, just like pain is debilitating, itch is debilitating.
The amount that you might itch and the place that you might itch has to do with the network of nerves inside your body and the messages that those nerves are receiving from chemical irritants from outside your body or the chemical messengers within your body.
And my understanding, and I'll just note that I am not a scientist, I am not a doctor, I am a lay person who knows a lot about this, unfortunately, from experience, is that when you have a lot of So basically itchy receptors, nerve fibers that accept itch and you have a lot of chemicals that engender itch like histamine and others in those sites, you'll feel itchy.
And one thing that happens to me and I know happens to other people with chronic illness who get itching is that it actually you'll feel itchy on the inside of your body. Like, you know, in your guts, right? Like part of your body that has, you know, you're not itchy on your skin and you can't get to it. So there's no way to scratch it.
And I remember talking with a number of dermatologists who were like, well, you don't really have the nerves for itching on the inside of your body. And, you know, I would talk to other doctors or doctors. patients, people who itched, and they'd be like, no, no, no. And I felt this way too. I was like, no, I swear that I feel it.
And I finally found this one neuroscientist who was like, oh, no, no, some of those fibers exist inside your body. So yeah, anywhere where you have those, there's probably a little bit of itching possible. And I felt very, very good knowing that. But yeah, so I think that your hands, your hands are just enormously sensitive, right?
Like so many of these touch receptors and receptors for hot and cool are on your hands. I think your feet and your scalp are also places that are just really, really sensitive in your body, whereas, you know, like, you know, the small of your back or something might be less innervated in that way.
Absolutely. I've tried to come up with a lot of metaphors for itching, and I feel like we have a lot of metaphors for pain, right? Unfortunately, all of us in human bodies experience pain and often really severe pain. And itching is basically a universal phenomenon also. But itching feels kind of qualitatively different to pain, at least to me in some ways. It can be really hard to tune out.
I always describe it as being like a car alarm, right? Like you can't stop thinking about it. It interrupts you somehow. It feels like being trapped inside your own body. And, you know, maybe pain has these qualities for other people. Sometimes I describe it as like a feeling of drowning. It creates in me a sense of fight or flight, but there's nothing to flee from and nothing to fight.
I guess you can scratch yourself and you're fighting your own body. It has this kind of hallucinatorially strange quality for me sometimes. You're feeling things that aren't there. And sometimes I even get that sense, I will feel things on my skin when I'm looking at the skin and there's nothing there. And it's It can be spooky in a way. And notably, there's lots of different ways to feel itchy.
There's burning itch. There's kind of electric itch. There's sunburn itch. Our brain is amazing at sensing things in unbelievably refined ways. And so, yeah, you know, sometimes it's just a bug bite. And sometimes I'm like, I could write a book trying to describe this.
Absolutely.
I think everybody who listens to this is going to do that. We can talk about why that is. Why is that? Tell me why that is. So just to go back to one thing that you said, and then I'll answer that question. But yeah, scratching, it engenders pain in the skin, which interrupts the sensation of itch. And it gives you the sense of relief that actually feels really good.
It's really pleasurable to scratch. And then when you stop scratching, the itch comes back. And the problem is that when you scratch or you damage your skin in order to stop the itch, to interrupt the itch, you actually damage the skin in a way that then makes the skin more itchy because you end up with histamine in the skin.
And histamine is one of the hormones that generates itch within the body. But to go back to what you were saying, there's actual studies that show that itching is contagious. So watching somebody scratch will make a person scratch. There's this interesting question.
Are people scratching empathetically in the way that we will mirror the movements of people around us in the way that yawning is contagious or crying can be contagious? But it turns out that no, it's probably a self-protective thing. If you see somebody scratching, there's some ancient part of your body that says that person is might have scabies.
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