Itching to tell someone

Everyone knows it is rude to discuss medical conditions in polite company. But sometimes the solution to a lifelong mystery falls into your lap, and you just have to let people know.

As a kid, I never understood why nearly every place we went on vacation, the souvenir shops all sold back-scratchers. Think about it for a second, here is an item so universally available as to suggest that there are a lot of people out there with itchy backs. Yet to a kid, this seems like the dumbest product in the world! If once-in-a-while you get an itch in a plce you can't reach...you just ask a friend or family member to give the old back a scratch. Simple right? Whoever invented that back-scratcher was some dummy!!!

It wasn’t until my mid 20’s, when I started to notice an itch on the same patch of my right shoulder blade, that those souvenir back-scratchers began to make sense.

For most of my adult life I have suffered silently with this annoying back itch, and I’ve spent a lot of time acting like a big shaggy bear, rubbing against doors, coat hooks and trees. I’ve even enlisted friends, family, and coworkers to assist me in reaching that annoying spot. One of my assistants finally got so sick of me asking that she bought me a Goofy back-scratcher while she was on vacation at Disney World (thanks Sara). I even have a friend who has taught his dog, Casey – a big English Pointer mix – to scratch his back on command! Clearly this is a widespread phenomenon, yet people don’t really talk about it much.

I visited doctors…tried anti-itch creams and moisturizers…nothing helped.

Then one day the little light bulb in my head began flashing as a fellow musician began telling me about an itch he had had on his right shoulder blade for most of his adult life. Unlike me, he had found a doctor that was familiar with the problem and was even able to give it a name: notalgia paraesthetica.

Very simply, this common condition occurs because the nerves that provide sensation to the upper back are very susceptible to damage at the place where they emerge from the spine. It is theorized that heavy lifting, or some other sort of back trauma is somehow to blame, so ironically the place where one feels the itch has nothing to do with the cause. This is what fancy-pants doctors call a 'referred sensation'. So, short of deadening the nerve endings (with something like Capsaicin) or doing a nerve block at the source, there really isn’t much anyone can do for the problem.

The good news is that I now understand that I am not alone…far from it, in fact. All those back-scratchers in all the souvenir shops around the world were made with me in mind (along with all the millions of others walking around with this itchy problem).

Somehow, knowing the cause, and the name, of my itch is important. It doesn’t make it any better (or worse), but it allows me the illusion of control over my health…something that becomes more and more imperative as my lifeboat drifts dangerously close to the shoals of middle-age.

Strange journal entry today? Yes.

Helpful? Only you can be the judge of that.

Reason I wanted to share? I’ve been itching to tell someone.