13 years with hyperhidrosis and finally accepting it
No, I’m not the handkerchief girl. I’m the hyperhidrosis girl.
I didn’t just wash my hands. It’s my palmar hyperhidrosis. Hyperhidrosis is the abnormally excessive sweating which may not necessarily be related to rises in temperature or physical activities. Sweating is our body’s mechanism (homeostasis) to cool itself but our sweat glands are overactive and don’t get the ‘We are cool now’ part. Maybe we are just too hot for people. That’s why we have higher body temperature than normal and so we sweat more and at times for no apparent reason. Just kidding. It’s hyperhidrosis and very few people are affected, approximately 3% of the population.
Actually living with it
“It’s not even that serious. You won’t die. Get over yourself.”
Really? Try picking up a dumbbell. Jokes apart, true that it’s not dangerous, but it does affect our life and disrupts some of our daily activities. We fail at painting, drawing, handicrafts, handling papers and even at sports. It’s hard for us to grip the car steering wheel, hold hands as well as shake hands. But we do give the saltiest clapbacks since our hands also are.
However, it isn’t as funny as we make it seem. Our hyperhidrosis has led us to shy away from people and even when interacting with them, we try to hide our hands. We become more introverted and prefer avoiding people because we feel embarrassed to shake hands or if they see our sweaty palms, they will feel disgusted. We may be happy to see them but our hyperhidrosis makes it seem as if we are not.
All weird things that happen to us:
1. Our hands get more attention.
Everyone stares at our hands during jobs interviews and then we start thinking about what the interviewers must be thinking about our hands. Maybe they think I’m lying. Maybe they think I’m nervous, scared and not happy to be there. I am excited but my hands don’t cooperate. Once an interviewer’s attitude changed when she saw my hands and started to ask me more fraught questions. Maybe she wanted to see if my palms will be sweatier or less sweaty. They became less sweaty though. Yes, because my excitement to work with you is gone now. Thank you very much.
2. Fingerprints are our weakness.
Fingerprints don’t work at times and the screen of our phone goes crazy too. It becomes overly responsive when our fingers touch the screen or not responsive at all. Before using our fingerprint for unlocking, we have to wipe our palms as well as our phone several times.
3. We avoid people in fear of embarrassing ourselves, not because we are introverts.
If you are someone who uses your hands a lot to express yourself, you’ll know why. Once I accidentally patted a friend’s shoulder while laughing and there was a palm print on her sleeve. She was grossed and yelled and I sank in embarrassment. We know people will judge us and our hands, that’s why it’s better to just avoid them as well as the embarrassment we might face.
4. General medical checkup.
How? Well, everyone feels apprehensive about that, right? Especially when it includes blood withdrawal and the blood sugar test for a lancing device is used to get a drop of blood. Things can get messy. One general medical checkup, my hands were sweating and shaking during the blood sugar test and the blood got mixed with my sweat and started dripping. Both the health care assistant and I were stunned.
5. Dressing up for summer and winter.
With axillary hyperhidrosis, we have to wear darker clothes or wear layers over our outfits to hide our underarm sweat which is noticeable through our clothes. With plantar hyperhidrosis, we can’t wear shoes that are open. We have to break up with our heels because they can break our legs. Sneakers and socks are our best friends forever. And yes, we can’t even walk barefooted as well because 1. We can trace back our footprints and 2. We can slip and fall thanks to our sweaty feet. And when it comes to palmar hyperhidrosis, unfortunately, we can’t wear mittens or gloves because even in winter, our palms sweat and they become cold and clammy, just like the hands of dead people. Even in air-conditioned rooms, our hyperhidrosis is still there and we feel colder. Why? Try going out in winter just after taking a cold shower. You will get it.
6. Struggling with things in public.
Trying to open our water bottle is embarrassing in public and worse is asking someone to open it for you. This always makes me feel as if I’m still in pre-primary school. There are times when dehydration is there during summer because we can’t open the water bottle that we carry all the time. Picking up the pen that slipped through our sweaty hands and fell down, means picking up the pen along with the dust particles from the ground which have clung to the pen.
7. Makeup and hair.
With palmar hyperhidrosis, trying to wear makeup and styling our hair are really arduous tasks. We can’t let our palm touch our face and we have to constantly wipe our hands when applying makeup and styling our hair. We can’t wear henna, even if we want to.
8. Trying antiperspirants or deodorant
Applying antiperspirants or deodorant work for axillary hyperhidrosis and there are other options to stop sweating such as botox surgery (too scared for to be honest)and iontophoresis(even scarier). Unfortunately we can’t wear deodorant on our palms. Despite antiperspirants, the sweating doesn’t stop. Even osmosis won’t work.
Throughout my adolescence, I didn’t even know what was really happening to my palms and my father kept telling me that it would go afterwards. Now I am an adult but it’s still there. We become anxious and nervous because we are sweating and as a result we sweat even more because we are nervous because of our sweating. On the long term, our hyperhidrosis has affected our career choices, relationships, self-image, self-confidence and even our emotional health. However, as I grew up, I found friends sharing the same problem and this made me feel less lonely. That ‘Really? You too’ moment further triggered our hyperhidrosis because we got excited that we are not alone in this.
The truth
It is not going away though. We try so hard to hide this but I think it’s easier to just admit it. Sweating is part of homeostasis to regulate body temperature as well as a result of the fight or flight response triggered by adrenaline secreted by our adrenal glands. Sweating is always being associated to bad feelings such as anxiety, nervousness, and sickness, stress, crying and being disgusting. My hands sweat a lot when I’m also happy, excited, laughing and really having fun. So don’t make it as if I’m not. Rather than a flaw, this is just a reminder that we do feel genuine emotions, be it happiness, sadness, anxiety, stress, excitement or anger. We can’t avoid emotions because we are not dead.
