Any help for skin that gets sticky when it gets wet?

Lucille and Mahniah Interesting, I take no meds except omeprazole which is an antacid. Cortisol bottoming out? Stress usually raises cortisol levels, whats your cholesterol level do you know? My hands are only sticky when damp my whole self I should say. Sugar seems to make matters worse for me.
Icky

Wow, I'm hearing too many similarities to my own situation not to be ignored. In May I was admitted to the hospital for a DHE treatment to try & break a 5-yr continuous migraine. What was supposed to be only 48 hrs of hanging out while receiving the IV med turned into a 5-day stay when my cortisol level bottomed out. I was even more sick/exhausted after returning home & slept 15+ hrs/day for the next 5 days. Once home I continued on the lamictal that I started in the hospital. During the first month of the lamictal I began noticing that my inner legs were sticking to each other during the night. The lamictal gave me such horrific night terrors, halucenations, etc. that I assumed the sticky legs were from night sweats. Although effective in noticably lessening the migraine, I couldn't handle the emotional upset from the dreams. So, I was prescribed topamax as an alternative (late June). By July I was very much aware that what once had been a stickiness on my upper legs & inner thighs had spread to my arms. By the end of the month my entire head & body were covered. At that time it all seemed so odd that I still doubted the seriousness of the matter, even wondering at times if it was a case of too much imagination. In late June I stopped taking the topamax in part due to some of the side effects & b/c I had upcoming surgery.
The first week in August I had a multi-level spinal fusion, the stress of which again caused my cortisol level to plummet. By the time I left the hospital even my family could see a much heavier, sticky wax-like covering over my skin (& now hair) whereas before they weren't even sure if they were feeling it the same as I. 10 days following surgery I was started on prednisone to help some of the aftermath issues --- extreme exhaustion, rapid weight loss, low-grade fever, inflamation, etc. The on-going prednisone is the only new medication being taken now that was not taken for a month prior to surgery.
Not sure if i's just wishful thinking, but I have noticed that over the past few days that this skin covering may be improving slightly. It's not getting any worse which in & of itself is something to be thankful for. After reading these last few posts I can't help but feel we may have found the connection to the cause. The fact that this covering can't be washed off, scratched through, etc. now makes me wonder it it's really a "covering" or has our skin's composition changed so radically that what we're feeling is actually the new texture of our skin. Have any of you who have been working through your docs ever had that type of discussion?

Hi again, Lucille! It doesn´t seem like a good thing that you stopped sweating from the skin except for head and armpits. But as long as yo do perspire there, atleast there are some channels open so to speak. I also thougth alot about the internal issue, since my M.E condition started shortly after the sticky skin condition first happened. Did it cause the M.E....I have been having reall issues from my stomach and mucous membranes and I know for instance my uptake of fatty acids and some minerals are very low in bloodtests. i dont know if it has been the sticky coating affecting the lining i the bow too, and the uptake of nutrients, but I have worried about it, having to let it go, and just try to live with it. for a period of time i was not sticky or atleast a lot less and I think that has calmed me some, to know that it can go away, even if i dont know what I did, I did alot of things to try aand help the body, or what made it go away the first time and beeing annoyed over not knowing what exactely to do now, maybee i won´t get better maybee i will. But keep in mind that you can get better and try not to worry to much in the meantime, ( not easy) just do your best to take care of your body with good water and food and to relax as much as possible and hopefully it will resolve this eventually. In your case i get the feeling hormonal issue, but that is just a hunch. It´s allways hard to tell from what someone only writes to describe, since we all have diffferent ways of describing the sticky waxy, rubbery coating. But for you there really seems to be a heavy coating and i get the feeling it s more wax-like for u, and i get the feeling that your body is producing this wax, the coating from some sort of hormonall imbalance. ( for me sometimes I think is more a skin structure build up process, hard t tell i could be either that or something produced, or the one thing leading to the other) ( oh i wished someone knew a doctor who was willing to research this condition) again just using gutfeeling now.. Some years ago when i was searching the internet for someone else who had ecperienced this, I came across a couple of sites where people who had been taking a kind of SSRI antidepressants did get this really heavy sticky waxy coating their desciption and yours remind me of eachothers. and some of them had it only on their scalp, and I remember someone else who had stopped sweating, except from the head. I´ve seen that again, here i think, wasnt there someone else who sweated only fro head here too? aperantly you can get all sorts of strange reactions from when you stopp talking certain kinds of SSRI drugs was my point, and that one person who had been taking those had a theory about it affecting cortisole levels and something else to produce the stickyness on her. and Im sorry I dont remember more now, but I think it was interesting because I had also read a repost about aquired cutaneous adherence in prostatecancer patients taking cortisone+ketocanazole. I was using a cortisone ointment the first time i got sticky... So i have been thinkin cortisone, cortisole+ diffferent kind of drugs, inteninally taken as ketoconasole, unitentionally taken, as in my chemichal accident with the glue whatever that contained, and so on...I just think cortisone and other hormones may be causing this in combination with certain drugs or chemichalls, hormones beeing the messengers used to dock onto receptores telling the cells what to do, what to produce etc. also my thougt about the ontaminations of hundereds of different chemichals all of us have in the body today, maybe the interact with our hormones making them do funky things or, acting as extra hormones, so that the body for instanse get symtomes from haveing too much from a hormon or to little, if synthetic ones block the receptores. But what di i know ;)In the reports of drug-indused (aquired) cutaneous adherence descibed in the literature ( as the cutis-article and the ketoconazole+cotrisone reposrts, links in my first posts) maybe we can find links to why this can happen when not taking those drugs. what do the drugs contain and what is it they affect? How do they induce aquired cutaneous adherence and what other substances could too?. In some of the reports about aquired cutaneous adherence i´ve read ( there doesn´t seem to be many and i havn´t been able to gett acces to some of the full reports to some I encountered on the internet) ,the skin seem to be sticky also when dry,(!) hence the condition gets more attention and people taking those drugs with cancer where already under supervision, and they knew the drugs had to have caused it. I went to a skin doctor who had no previous experience of the condition, never even heard about it, but took a little intereset but came to the conclusion after reading one of the Cutis-article I brought with me, that the condition described as acuired cutaneous adherence seemed to be sticky skin also when dry, therefore i did not have that (!) dont know if aquired cutaneous adherence is the same thing as some of us describe since whe here have the not sticky when dry type, but maybe the doctors just havent got clue, just wanted to point out that there seem to bee a condition with sticky dry skin and one with sticky, but not when dry. Acuired cutneos adherence beeing described in the literature, the second variant not that i know of. Anyone who has encountered such a report except people on forums? there seems for me as if it appears to be different subgroups, some of us sweat more some of us stop to sweat in combination with the stickyness. Maybee just different sides of the same coin though. The person who wrote about the funky smelling sweat i can realate to, my sweat suddenly smelled like burned rubber tire or something when i got sticky, toxic products leaving the body? There are so many interessting leads for someone knowledgable to follow here. I wish i wern´t so affected from my M.E, i used to be able to bee short and conisce, and draw conclusions and pick up important questions, but know i just feel that i have to write her what comes to mind, and use what i leaned over the years even if the are just my thougts and conclusins and i don´t have te enrgy to do the detective work for now.But for now i hope just to be of some use, even if the answers here get really long, sorry folks ;) Again new people, try and always write what kind of products, medications and other changes you migt have made around the time you got sticky. Try to think of things, it may not bee yhe most obviouse.....Making little notes still thinking we should put the data somewhere like our on sticky webpage, someone good at making them? ;) Take care!
/ Kacha