When you live with psoriasis, getting your condition under control is one thing. Keeping the mess in your home, office, and car at bay is quite another! From your clothes and bedding to hard floors, carpeting, and upholstery, cleaning up after yourself when you have psoriasis can feel like a full-time job.
“It’s not an exaggeration when I tell you that I was covered from head to foot. My skin was shedding off me like a snake molting,” says Matt Kiselica, 57, a finance professional in Richmond, VA, who has been living with psoriasis for nearly 40 years.
Kiselica and one of his “psoriasis psisters,” as he calls her, share their pro tips for protecting clothes and bedding and getting all those flakes out of the way.
Protecting Your Clothes
When it comes to clothes, there are a few things you need to consider with psoriasis: flakes, topical skin products, and blood.
At one point, Kiselica, whose psoriasis is well controlled with systemic medication now, had problems with all three. As a finance professional, he wore suits to work every day. They tended to be on the darker end of the color spectrum, so he always kept adhesive lint rollers handy to remove any errant skin flakes.
His more serious concern though was damaging his white shirts and dry-clean-only suits with stains from all the creams and ointments he needed to slather on just to get through the day. His skin was constantly cracking and bleeding, too.
“I would wear very thin clothes, like leggings and a long-sleeved shirt, underneath whatever I was wearing to work. I would put that layer over the lotion and medications to protect my shirts and suits,” he says.
Tami Seretti, 56, had a little more flexibility in what she could wear, given that her job didn’t require dark suits. She had severe scalp psoriasis, when she was diagnosed 27 years ago before getting her condition under control with systemic medications.
“I never wore black, dark colors, or even solid colors. With a print, flakes don’t show nearly as much,” says Seretti, who no longer works due to disability from psoriatic arthritis. Based outside of Pittsburgh, she is now a patient advocate for the National Psoriasis Foundation.
Seretti stashed small, foldable lint brushes everywhere she could: her purse, her glove compartment, her desk drawer, and in drawers around the house. She preferred these to the adhesive ones because she went through those so quickly. A roll of masking tape does the trick, too, she adds.
As for what she wears underneath the light-colored printed clothing, she opts for cheap sports bras, underwear, and camisoles that she doesn’t mind throwing in the wash again and again and eventually tossing when the medication, moisturizer, and blood stains get to be too much.
Taking Care of Bedding
When Kiselica’s skin was at its worst, he wore his thin leggings and long-sleeved shirts to bed at night, too. That helped to trap the skin flakes and stains in one place.
Seretti also took the same approach with her bedding that she did with her undergarments. “I bought cheap sheets, pillowcases, pillows, and pajamas because you just couldn’t get the stains out of them. It was disgusting.”
As for colors and prints, it depends on your chief concerns. Like Seretti notes, light-colored printed sheets might hide flakes best. But darker sheets may do a better job masking greasy medication stains and blood spots.
Flake-Free Floors
When it comes to keeping floors clean, be proactive.
Kiselica finds he’s less likely to want to clean up skin flakes if it means pulling an unwieldy vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet every time or tracking down the Dustbuster wherever it might be charging at the moment. But putting off cleanup for too long isn’t an option, he says, as a pile of dead skin on the floor can attract dust mites.
“Keep Dustbusters or manual carpet sweepers handy in every room so that they are always accessible when you need them,” he says.
Another hazard, he notes, is tiled bathroom floors. Because you take off your clothes in the bathroom to shower, that’s one place that skin flakes can pile up really fast. And skin flakes on tile, he warns, can get very slippery. Don’t let them accumulate.
When Seretti realized skin flakes were going to be a part of life, she and her husband invested in a robot vacuum, and they have it set to run every day. She also keeps a regular vacuum cleaner on hand. She has a strong preference for the models that require a bag.
“I quit with the bagless vacuums because all those scales get stuck in there,” Seretti says. “It’s easier to just change the bag rather than worry about cleaning out the bagless vacuum bin all the time.”
On the Job
Seretti is now disabled from psoriatic arthritis, but when she was still working, she was diligent about keeping her workspace flake-free.
“My workspace was open, not even a cubicle, and the first thing you’d see when you walked into the office,” she says.
At the end of each workday, she turned her keyboard over and shook the flakes into the garbage can, then sprayed the keyboard out with canned air, and finally wiped down the whole area with disinfectant wipes.
On the Road
While a car won’t get as piled up with skin as your house, since you don’t typically change clothes in there, it can still get pretty messy. Seretti vacuums her car out once a week, wipes down all the surfaces with Armor All wipes, and makes sure to clear the flakes out of the stick shift, too.
“Sure, it’s usually only me in there, but I don’t want to see that either,” she says. “I don’t need any more reminders about my psoriasis than I already have.”
