DH breakout with chills?

[Arwabint]

Hello again. My husband’s rash showed up three years ago and it cleared up pretty well as soon as he stopped gluten. recently he got a very severe breakout again and many of the bumps cracked open and became open lesions with pus, then a bit bloody, then scabs, etc. with this severe breakout came chills. he gets them throughout the day, not very strong but they’re definitely there. his doctor said that the chills may be his body’s response to the acute flare. has anyone else experienced this with a breakout? the breakout/chills have lasted over a month.  thanks in advance. 

 

 

[cyclinglady]

This might help (article from gluten-free And More?

https://www.glutenfreeandmore.com/issues/dermatitis-herpetiformis-the-celiac-disease-rash/

While I do not have DH, I have experienced chills when exposed to gluten along with many other symptoms.  

 

[TDZ]

On 10/20/2018 at 1:05 PM, Arwabint said:

Hello again. My husband’s rash showed up three years ago and it cleared up pretty well as soon as he stopped gluten. recently he got a very severe breakout again and many of the bumps cracked open and became open lesions with pus, then a bit bloody, then scabs, etc. with this severe breakout came chills. he gets them throughout the day, not very strong but they’re definitely there. his doctor said that the chills may be his body’s response to the acute flare. has anyone else experienced this with a breakout? the breakout/chills have lasted over a month.  thanks in advance. 

 

 

Little late here, but my husband has chills all the time with his. He's been frying us all winter, cranking up the heat! It doesn't help that he can't wear a shirt because it irritates the rash.

[Alaskaguy]

TDZ, I am so sorry to hear about what your husband is going through.

I have also experienced unusual chills more or less at the same time as DH outbreaks.  Not severe chills with the violent shivering, as one can get from a repeat bout of malaria, but just not being able to get warm, even when the house is at its same normal temperature --- sometimes I would check the thermostat, almost certain that the heat had failed for some reason, then walking around the house with an extra sweater, or even a jacket, and a pullover cap.  But my chills would only last a day or two at a time, nothing like what your husband is going through.

Do you know how your husband got exposed to so much gluten, so as to have such a severe DH outbreak?

[TDZ]

1 hour ago, Alaskaguy said:

Do you know how your husband got exposed to so much gluten, so as to have such a severe DH outbreak?

Not a clue, other than normal eating. He ate a fair amount of bread, and pasta and pizza and such. Right before the massive outbreak in November, there was a peppermint/chocolate-drizzled popcorn that I got at Walmart, and it gave both of us horrible diarrhea, and within a few days he was covered with more rash than ever before. Might have been unrelated, but it's the only unusual thing that times out right for any causality. Otherwise, he wasn't eating anything different.

The first thing that I suspect started it was weedeating the yard a couple of years ago -- I'm seeing that wheat allergies correlate with grass allergies, because wheat is a grass and is related to lots of things. That one particular day, he started getting the rash and thought he must be allergic to a particular plant that we had noticed and hadn't ever had before, and it really never completely went away after that -- ebb and flow, but no remission, and then gradually getting worse and worse and spreading to other areas. So maybe that was the initial sensitization, and then the gluten continued it. Just a guess, though.

[Alaskaguy]

TDZ, that is interesting that you mention weed-eating as coinciding with the start of your husband's rash, as about 12 years ago I had a possibly similar experience.  It was in the spring (meaning late May here in SC Alaska), and I was cutting the lawn.  Rather than bagging up all the lawn clippings, I would just take the filled bag off the mower, walk into the woods behind the house, and pull out the clippings with my hand and then scatter them around (so that they didn't just all rot and fester in one stinking pile).  Well, the next morning I woke up with (mainly) the thumb and index finger of my right hand, and all the skin in-between, being red and inflamed and VERY itchy.  Soon the itching spread, and turned into tiny red bumps.  Then it became painful and highly sensitive, like a burn, and looked that way, too.  After four or five days, little areas of skin starting loosening up and peeling, and before long pretty much the entire skin of my right hand was peeling off, just like a glove!  I did go to a doctor and had a skin biopsy done, but nothing was determined, and the doctor was stumped.

Years after that, I was talking to an acquaintance who was a botanist, and she casually mentioned about how the wild buttercups that are a common weed here are severely poisonous, and caustic, and how their juices can burn the skin to the point of it sloughing off.  And as it happens, those same buttercups were all through my lawn that year when I had my skin incident!  Now, I'm not saying that you might have those same plants in your yard, but there are any number of other plants that could react similarly, especially to somebody whose skin and immune systems are already compromised --- any plants in the carrot/celery family, for example, can play Hell on the skin, and we have at least two such wild plants here in Alaska that have repeatedly caused me great grief.  In fact, I have seen groundskeepers here who while weed-whipping will wear full hazmat suits, as the juices from one of those carrot family plants (Cow parsnip) is well known for causing serious skin burns, rashes and even permanent scarring.