A woman was left housebound and unable to brush her hair after her skin became ‘addicted’ to a steroid cream used to treat her eczema – leaving her in “torture”. Megan Crome, 27, was diagnosed with eczema when she was six years old and found her condition worsened over the years.
She used steroid creams to help treat her eczema before discovering that she was suffering from topical steroid addiction (TSA) causing her skin to weep and scab. Megan decided to stop the steroids but now suffers from topical steroid withdrawal - which causes severe symptoms in prolonged steroid users - and spent six weeks off work in 2021 and had to be looked after by her mum, Claire, 55.
She describes her skin feeling like a “third degree burn” all over her body and had to have her mum brush her hair and dress when the symptoms were at their worst. Megan is now back to work but still suffers from relapses but believes she is now “slowly healing".
Megan, a digital marketer, from Bow, London, said: “It was like having a third-degree burns all over my body. I couldn’t lift my arms to brush my hair.
“I was lying with my legs out on the sofa all day. My skin was red and weeping and I had a burning sensation.
“Your skin feels so dry - it's like the Sahara desert. It was painful to make an expression.
“It’s like a torture.”
Megan’s eczema became worse during her GCSEs and started to affect her face. “It came back with a vengeance,” she said.
Her skin got better when she went to college, which she believes was from less stress, but got worse again when she started work at 18. “In school I once had a teacher tell me to take my make-up off because it was awful,” Megan said.
“I replied and told them it was my eczema. But that kind of thing sticks with you.”
Megan was put on Elocon, a steroid cream, when she was 18, and pro-topic for her face. In February 2021, she started to realise that some of the scabs she was experiencing were different to her usual eczema symptoms and discovered people talking about TSA on Facebook groups.
“It was a lightbulb moment,” Megan said. “I went cold turkey and stopped all my steroid treatments and moisturising.”
Megan’s withdrawal symptoms became so bad that she had to stop work and move back in with her mum, Claire. “I didn’t look like a human,” she said.
“I was at my worst.”
Megan became housebound until her symptoms lessoned enough for her to go back to work in June 2021. “I still had a red raw patch on my face when I went back,” she said.
Since she has had several relapses but has been able to maintain working through them. She was given an official diagnosis of TSW in October 2022 – following a flare up in September of last year.
“This will probably affect me for another couple of years while my body heals itself,” Megan said. “It’s changed my perspective of life.
“It shows you how valuable your health is.”
