Post by @chlotats

A big (& long, sorry😆🫣) update for for you all!! Dupixent gave me my life back at a time when I genuinely didn’t recognise my life anymore. When I started it in June 2024, my skin had completely consumed me because of Topical Steroid Withdrawal. I’d been hospitalised, I was exhausted, scared of my own body and desperate for some kind of stability. And Dupixent gave me that. It gave me sleep. It gave me freedom. It gave me holidays, exercise, clothes, plans and normality again. It gave me the space to stop just surviving my skin and actually start living my life again. So I don’t think I’ll ever be anything other than grateful for what this medication did for me 🤍 But over time, things started to change. My body was clear, but I was still struggling with facial and neck flares which are a common side effect of dupixent, which eventually (at 8 months) led me to start gradually spacing my injections to see whether it made a difference. Slowly, those gaps became longer and longer… until I reached 12 weeks and made the decision not to take another dose. Today, I’m 16 weeks since my last Dupixent injection. And writing that feels quite surreal. My skin is currently doing incredibly well. My body is clear, my face has been calmer and I recently had some of the best holiday skin and post exercise skin I’ve had in years. I don’t know what happens from here. I don’t know whether I’ll stay off Dupixent forever. I don’t know whether my skin will change again. And I would never pretend that my experience means somebody else should make the same decision. But I do know that the skin I have today is very different from the skin I had when I desperately needed this medication two years ago. Maybe this is the end of my Dupixent chapter. Maybe it isn’t. For now, I’m just taking it week by week, learning to trust my body again, feeling excited to actually get to the root cause of my skin triggers and, as always, sharing the reality of it with you - whatever happens next 🤍 Coming off Dupixent doesn’t take away from what it did for me. Two things can be true at once: I can be incredibly grateful that it gave me my life back, while also being ready to see what life looks like without it. *none of this is advice it is my own personal experience #tsw #TopicalSteroidWithdrawal #skin #dupixent