Scratch until it bleeds.

I have begun to worry and daydream a lot more.

I worry about skin atrophy and scratching and infections and stressing my hand by holding bowls and plates and chopsticks and by getting into bed and also quite possibly from typing this out right now (I have stopped trying to hold pens some time ago). I worry every time I feel minute bumps underneath my skin, knowing by now what blisters feel like long before they are visible.

Don't laugh it off when i say i think my hand is going to rot off or that I will get skin cancer one of these days because they are fears not completely illogical to me.

You wouldn't be able to go though this stoically, either, if you have watched your fingers swell and fill with liquids before your eyes, hundreds of blisters growing beneath the skin, stretching and merging into one giant bloat. It crushes.

Sometimes the tips of your fingers prickle from not getting enough blood, sometimes they turn blue. A few times the pressure of liquids exceed the force the skin is able to push and liquids ooze out in great droplets on their own. You would squeeze or force your fingers to bend so the outer skin pops to relieve the stinging pressure from the inside, not caring about the damage of the perforated skin that is left behind.

Don't scoff and tell me it can't be that bad when I scream that I itch because I always itch (when have YOU experienced constant itching?), and if I tell you it means I will soon be more than happily compelled to scratch all my skin off, literally, for the possibility of alleviating the itching for that instant. Stop me or I will head off that cliff, as I have done many times.

Don't tell me there's nothing such as unbearable itching until you have stayed awake, fearing sleep, to grasp at the controls that keep you from just scratch, scratch, and SCRATCH.