Heat Rash Hell: A 35-Year Struggle and the Bee Pollen That Saved Me

The Flying Frisby

A man having an attack of cholinergic urticaria

When I was 19, I started getting these weird heat rashes.

Every day, whenever I got hot, these debilitating, paralysing heat rashes would envelop me. Burning, bumpy, red weals suddenly covered my body. So itchy—you wanted to scratch everywhere, though scratching brought no relief. Once the rash started, there was nothing I could do. I just had to wait for it to pass, which would take about half an hour.

I didn’t even have to get so hot that I broke sweat for the rash to come on. Just walking briskly would do it, getting flustered, wearing a layer too many, even having a shower.

And it came every day, usually mid-morning.

I thought it might be stress that was causing it, but it was the other way around: these rashes were causing the stress.

I found a way of coping with it: do intense exercise every morning and actually induce the rash. Then it seemed to burn itself out for the rest of the day.

But the next morning, it would be back again.

I went to see doctors about it. None of them knew what it was. As GPs often do when they don’t know the answer, they brushed it aside, “Oh, it’s probably stress.” I wasn’t making this up! But unless I actually had an attack in front of the GP, there was no way of showing them what it was.

I saw a dermatologist, who gave me anti-depressants. I saw Chinese herbalist after Chinese herbalist, who all concocted these disgusting teas for me to drink. Lord knows what damage I did to my liver drinking that stuff. I saw an acupuncturist who declared brightly that he could cure it. But he couldn’t.

It made my life a nightmare, because you never quite knew when the rash was going to hit. What if it came on when I was on stage? During that all-important meeting? When I was with a girl I liked? It was a source of acute embarrassment.

The condition disappeared, bizarrely, if I went to the tropics. Why, Lord knows. But as soon as I got home, back it came.

Then I noticed the condition also disappeared in the summer. What was that about? I realised the antihistamine I was taking for hay fever also prevented these rash attacks.

But I didn’t want to take antihistamine every day—that couldn’t be healthy—so, once the hay fever season was over, I would go back to keeping it at bay by trying to do intense exercise every morning and burning it off.

When I got married and had kids, aged 30, this became impossible, so I resigned myself to daily antihistamine. This started with Clarityn (Loratadine), moved onto Zirtek (which I hated because if I drank alcohol, I used to get incredibly drunk and that led to a lot of bad decisions and mistakes) and, eventually, Xyzal, which I found I only needed to take every other day. The potential long-term damage of sustained anti-histamine use was a gamble I was prepared to make to avoid the daily nightmare of this condition.

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Eventually, I discovered that the problem I had was a condition called heat-induced cholinergic urticaria. I went to see a specialist at St Thomas' Hospital. “There is no cure,” she told me. “Sometimes it clears up by itself,” she told me, “sometimes not. You’re lucky antihistamine stops it. For many that doesn’t work.”

I volunteered to be a guinea pig so she could experiment on me as part of her research into the condition. I would go to the hospital, have a hot bath, my skin would erupt, and then she’d prod me and prick me and nod and mutter, but it got me no nearer to a cure.

Here I am at 54, and it has not cleared up.

What is the cause?

I’m still not quite sure if something I did caused it. Urticaria is from the same allergic school of illnesses as asthma, eczema, and hay fever, from which I suffer a little (asthma especially if I run or am near cats), so it might be hereditary or genetic. It affects young men more than any other group, which is what I was.

I’ve been on numerous forums where fellow sufferers discuss the condition, and a lot of us took the antibiotic tetracycline. I took it for years as a teenager to help with my acne. God, it makes me cross that I was allowed—even encouraged—to take it for so long. Bloody doctors, or one in particular (no longer with us so I won’t name him and speak ill of the dead), and my mother’s blind trust in them. I thought it might be tetracycline.

I had spent two months in Egypt just before I got my first outbreaks, and I got very ill with Giardia, a form of dysentary. Maybe I lost some essential bacteria in my stomach or something, or got leaky gut. (I’ve taken a million probiotics and all the rest of it—didn’t work).

Also just before the first outbreaks, I got the sh*t kicked out of me in a park in Milan by a group of young Italians - I mean properly beaten up, 7 v 1 and I made the mistake of fighting back - so maybe it was somehow related to that.

Maybe it was the accumulation of everything.

Nature’s magic superfood comes to the rescue

One of the unintended benefits of my health drive in recent years is that my asthma, which I’ve had since I was born, appears to have, for no apparent reason, gone. I haven’t been near cats to test it there, but I no longer need my puffer to play football. (Don’t know why. It might be an age thing; a health thing, most likely a seed oil thing).

Then I forgot to take my antihistamine for a few days, and I noticed that I wasn’t getting urticaria attacks either. Praise the Lord! I thought my urticaria might’ve cleared up too.

No such luck, as it turned out. It hadn’t. I went abroad and, after a few days, it came back.

Then I realised there was something I’d been taking at home, and I hadn’t taken it away with me.

It made all the difference.

That mysterious ailment you’ve had for ages and can’t rid of. this might sort that out too.

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