BE. VERY. CAREFUL.
As you probably already are.
Back in the heady heatwave of the summer of 2011 I developed an agonising, extensive weepy rash in the same area.
I put it down to heat rash from a long bike ride on a particularly hot day - I think it was the Essex Country Bumpkins Come to London ride.
The hot weather continued unabated and I was in agony.
Luckily, I wasn't working at the time so was able to spend a lot of time sitting around with one leg here <--, the other leg there -->, but no amount of application of Assos cream was making things better.
Needless to say, I pretty much stopped riding as the experience was akin to riding with 80grit production paper against my undercarriage. And fire.
Eventually, I went to see my GP.
She, being both young and good looking, was fascinated as she had just finished a course on sexually transmitted diseases - so nothing I was about to show her was going to shock her.
The STD route was swiftly dismissed. I showed her the Assos cream I'd been using to treat the lesons with. She checked the ingredients and declared there was nothing dodgy in there
A cream was prescribed. I think it was a steroid based one. After a few weeks use it made no difference.
I paid the GP another visit, she took another look, prescribed a military-grade cream saying that if this didn't work she'd arrange for an appointment with a consultant dermatologist, and I could carry on using the Assos cream if I felt it was helping when I (infrequently, now) went cycling (can you see a pattern developing here?).
And lo, six weeks later saw me in front of the Dermatologist at Lewisham Teaching Hospital. She QC'd the Assos cream and passed it as safe. Another cream was prescribed. This one had a special applicator
This one proved equally useless. I didn't know whether I would be able to cycle again. Someone on here who shall remain nameless used the word recumbent to me, and generally I was feeling like the world was falling out of my bottom. Whilst it burned.
On my second visit to the Dermatologist she washed her hands of me (can you see what I did there?) and referred me to the cutaneous allergies clinic at St. Thomas'.
Another month or so's wait for three appointments in short succession.
The first was a background / history one.
The second was on the Thursday before Good Friday to apply
every know chemical under the sun to various parts of my body, but mostly my back (Trust me when I tell you that is not the most icky image I can produce in relation to this story)
The third was on the following Tuesday to assess the results.
'Ohhhhhhhh!!!!' the doctor hissed excitedly, 'Is that painful?' prodding at an area of my back that had clearly been inflamed by the chemical.
No, not compared to what is going on downstairs -I replied - not having noticed any discomfort on my back.
Turns out I have an allergy to Methylisothiazolinone (yes, really) or MO as it is more commonly known and, according to Doc, on the verge of being banned by the EU on account of the epidemic like spread of people developing allergies to it.
It is put into water based products to arrest the development of bacteria.
Guess what? Assos cream has shedloads of it in it.
Doctor pointed me at a website where you type in the chemical's name and hit 'Return' and it tells you all the products this is found it (in the US only) It yielded hundreds of thousands of products, mostly cosmetics. But it's use is widespread.
I stopped using Assos cream immediately.
Bought another cream called Nature's Kiss which doesn't have MO - but in the end (ha-ha) decided that going creamless was the way forward.
I checked every single liquid chemical in my house.
No more Fairy washing up liquid for me, thank you.
I also realised the importance of keeping chemistuffs in their original containers / wrappers
So this is maybe a long and windy way of saying check out what is causing the leisions before treating them.
I'm not knocking the NHS, far from it, but two professionals saw me twice, over a period of around six months, before the third was able to pinpoint what the cause was - to be fair on the first two, or certainly my GP something like that may've been out side her frame of reference.
Stay off the bike. I suspect you'll find that advice as painful as I did. But riding is going to do nothing to accelerate recovery. You are lucky in as much as this is November - not August, when it happened to me.
Oh, and Ruthie is talking a lot of sense. As is usual.