| Hydrology
A life with sweaty, sweaty hands
|
As he did each week at mass, in a gesture of unity, the priest on the auditorium stage had asked my high school to link hands to pray the Our Father. I’d reached across the armrest and through the invisible plane separating my friend and me and had taken his left hand in my right, his on top, mine submissive below. A fullback on the football team, he didn’t hesitate with our small union; but as soon as we’d clasped hands, his fingers curled. I recognized the limpness of the grip: that of a reluctant dance partner.
|
|
This upset me, but I couldn’t protest that my hands weren’t gross (they were), and it didn’t help to suggest (as people did) that I blot them dry before joining hands, since I’d spent the whole homily before the Our Father wiping my palms like a pervert against the lining of my trouser pockets, trying and failing to upgrade them to moist. At first my friend shifted in place, then began gently tugging his hands away from mine. (I can’t remember who was on the other side; it’s likely I’d arranged to sit on an aisle, to avoid a double confrontation.) Though the mutual discomfort was clearly my fault, I wanted revenge on my friend for noticing my flaw, so I began to massage his thick fingers.
|
|
“Dude, knock it off,” he hissed between the trespasses and trespassers. I used the sweat like uncomfortable massage oil. As long as I was suffering …
|
|
“I’m f—— serious,” he hissed.
|
|
A moment later, the congregation paused and the priest recited his bit before the kingdom-power-glory coda.
|
|
“Amen,” six hundred of us sounded.
|
|
At this, he yanked his fingers from the slimy drain of my grip. Unlike other friends, he had the civility not to wipe his palm on his pants theatrically. He did so quietly, and his decency shamed me.
|
|
I don’t even want to talk about trying to spread “peace,” via handshakes, just before the offering. I hated peace.
|
|
All of which is to say that humans have a natural aversion to dankness. People with dank hands (and their handmaids, sweaty feet) know this—know it empirically, and spend every public hour trying not to stir up that disgust.
|
|
But their constant adjustments become tics, and then conditioned behavior that alters their personalities. The sweaty-limbed become restless, always swinging their arms, even while sitting, to create a breeze; or pulling their shoes on and off for air; or rolling shirt cuffs up and down, vainly seeking an even temperature. They also learn to hesitate, since there’s always reason to: For almost thirty years, my hands sweated regardless of the season, time of day, humidity, or social milieu—though the more I begged them not to, the more they dripped. When the sweating started, or rather resumed, it lasted for a few hours uninterrupted until the cooling physics of evaporation worked too well and my hands’ temperature plummeted to a cadaverous sixty degrees. That constant freezing and baking left my palms chapped, and the desiccation (losing all that sweat) divided my fingers into the crackly polygons of a sun-dried creekbed. Yet within a minute of drinking a glass of water, presto, they glistened again. The sweat wasn’t briny (my hands would have been crystallized in salt otherwise) and didn’t smell—there was no coarse hair to harbor bacteria, the ultimate cause of body odor. And the constant flow flushed my pores ‘clean’ every minute anyway. As far as sweat, it was the most pristine you could hope for: a light, shiny, almost attractive dew.
|
|
I sweat, too, in the standard pits and crevices (not excessively) and in one novel place: Because of a mild allergy, I get horizontal bands of moisture high on my cheeks when I eat sour apples, like the blacking beneath baseball players’ eyes. Yet in sheer gallons lost to the atmosphere, the only bodily rival to my hands was my feet. I learned to pack extra socks at work, since tan or blue socks—any but light-absorbing black—would be patchy with damp spots by lunch. I didn’t go as far as desperate people who threw out every non-white or non-black garment in their wardrobe, as if always on their way to Wimbledon or a wake. Though, after a theater production in high school under makeup-melting stage lights, I came to distrust colored T-shirts.
|
|
Still, pits can be hidden. Shoes can be kept on, even if every step inside them feels squish-squishy. Hands have to touch, type, grab, stroke. Few people grasp the sheer functionality of their hands until they break one, or are hobbled by hands so slippery they can’t open jars. Limitations also include not being able to write with pencils, because soggy paper won’t absorb graphite. (Imagine doing long division after a jog in August.) I’d tear holes in tests as my hand skied its way to the right margin, little accordion crumples that my prose had to skirt. I adapted by using scraps or index cards as blotters, sticking them like postage stamps to the underside of my writing hand and carrying them along line to line. Once, suddenly needing to jot a few ideas, I grabbed an un-RSVPed wedding invitation. By the time the inspiration passed, I’d soaked the envelope through. It sealed shut.
|
|
If I ever knew how to dress properly, my hands expunged the knowledge at thirteen, when social touching became expected. Having to choose in junior high between oily or reptilian hands, I opted for reptilian. I wore short-sleeve shirts beneath my jackets during prairie winters and shunned hats, convincing my parents that as a runner I’d grown accustomed to cold. At college, finally in charge of my diet, I skipped meals for the same reasons: food was fuel, and mammalian bodies, once they’ve depleted their fuel, hoard energy by neglecting non-essential processes like heating the limbs. Fasting too long, however, had the perverse effect of inducing a tiny case of shock and making me break out in a cold running sweat, a physiological stagflation that proved a particularly disgusting sensory combination, like holding raw, thawing seafood.
|
|
I was aware my mannerisms were, to be kind, abnormal. That other people didn’t consider restricting fluids before essay exams and didn’t carry wadded, soon disintegrated tissues in their pockets. And statistically speaking, I must have shaken hundreds of sweaty hands growing up, male and female—I just never knew it. I always assumed any moisture was my fault. I prayed for everything as a teenager, yet it never occurred to me to petition the Lord that the sweating stop. Clearly He could help me win track races or boost my ACT score—one-time miracle interventions. But my fingers leaked sub specie aeternitatis. God cannot make a rock so heavy He cannot lift it, and my hands fell into the same general class of impossibilities.
|
|
Another reason I never sought help, spiritual or otherwise, was that I never thought I’d get away with calling a stunted, adolescent embarrassment a medical disorder. I assumed I was merely unlucky, one of a few thousand on God’s green earth who, on a bell curve of how much people sweat, was eight to ten standard deviations to the swampy side. It never occurred to me that a dermatologist could draw a line, partition a chunk of the bell and say, “No. Past this point you have hyperhidrosis.”
|
|
Hyperhidrosis. I generally take joy in discovering that words exist for highly specific and previously inarticulate situations or emotional states; this case stands out in my memory. All social freaks have had this moment I suppose: I typed “sweaty hands” into Yahoo! one night in college at 2 a.m., and amid some putrid poetry discovered that word—the word for hyper hydration of the hands, feet, forehead, pits, and at times the (as I read with increasing horror and speed, realizing some were worse off than me) buttocks and groin. The awfulness of those last two both chilled me and of course made my hands drool more.
|
|
Words have a funny power. For most of my day, my hands were the exact condition that the adjective “clammy” was coined to describe, as my friends, aspiring amateur lexicographers all of them, have unhelpfully noted. Clammy became a trigger word, a phrase potent enough to kick-start my skittish fight-or-flight response. In fact, any reference to hands in a book could dismantle my attention for pages. One novelist had tenacious memories of square-dancing with “a sweaty-palmed dud,” giving me tenacious memories of her word choice. In an insult hurled from Chaucer’s era, I once read of clammy being equated with “an yele [eel]. . . a slymye fyshe.” After descriptions of lovers clasping hands—or, alarmingly, a man stroking a woman’s back or bare breast—I had best hope that the next four pages were not integral to the plot, so often would my mind be looping back to the offending passage.
|
|
The most torrential fantasy was inspired by an anecdote about Charles Dickens. Tricked into meeting his fans at a boarding-house owned by a shady proprietor, Dickens had to sit still at a desk while a whole town paraded up a flight of stairs to meet the world-famous writer, each of them getting the handshake promised for his penny. It took hours. Dickens, being Dickens, incorporated that sideshow into a barely fictionalized chapter in a later work. But I can’t remember which one because within a few sentences I had lost the drift of the story: I was behind the desk in Dickens’s place—touching hundreds of hands, ten-thousands of fingers, watching fawning eyes crumple, sliming babies’ cheeks, and tattooing full, dark handprints on gentlemen’s patted shirts.
|
|
Before I could read the Dickens account a second time (and I had to)—hell, even before I had time to shiver or suck air through my teeth the first time through, my hands broke out in sweat. The adrenaline acted that quickly. Considering that nerve impulses rely on molecules bumping into each other, and considering that those molecules are immensely tiny and must travel whole solar systems to push information from my brain to my fingertips, it seems impossible I didn’t have a moment to myself before the dam burst. But adrenaline both fires the nerves that activate the body’s sweat reflex, and inhibits cerebral blood flow to the brain, meaning I’d warped the pages before my mind realized it, before it could realize it. At those moments I had to face the possibility my body was just the material sum of billions of chemical reactions, racing at speeds I couldn’t comprehend. A meat computer.
|
|
The comfort was that maybe sweaty hands weren’t my fault.
|
|
Hyperhidrosis became a trigger word too, but one I found myself actively seeking. And the more I read, the more convenient it became to forget my principled stand against medicalizing sweaty hands. I reasoned that people had made the same mistakes with epilepsy and depression in the olden days, not taking them seriously, pooh-poohing them—and look at the sum of human lives laid waste! The moral of the social freak story should be that he is just like everyone else—and not just in aspirations and hang-ups, but in the way he most desires being like everyone else.
|
|
My first attempt to treat hyperhidrosis came during my last year of college, when an internist prescribed an optimistically named medication, Drysol. It came in a white, oversized chapstick container with a sopping tip, and my doctor recommended I apply it three nights per week at bedtime. I tried seven to start. Drysol requires a prescription, which is odd—it seems an unlikely candidate for abuse. It’s just concentrated deodorant, aluminum chloride hexahydrate, and not all that concentrated (eleven percent active ingredients). But Drysol failed to cure me, as it does most people: It targets a symptom and not the out-of-whack metabolism underlying it. Not realizing this, I quit after a month and abandoned treatment.
|
|
Then I moved a few times in a few years, and finally a Washington, D.C., summer mugged me into make a hasty appointment with a new doctor. She suggested Drysol again, so I went over her head and made an appointment with a thoracic surgeon. Before this I had always assumed that, in colloquial terms, my thermostat was busted. That my body could not regulate its own temperature and that its settings drifted, got stuck on high, or plain failed to click on. That’s not wrong, but really my sweating was caused by a manic thyroid gland and a sympathetic nervous system whose fight-or-flight response was set at an embarrassingly low threshold voltage. It was part of my hard wiring, and that’s why I’d come to the surgeon. Drysol had failed so utterly I assumed anything short of tearing me open and snipping the sympathetic nerve responsible for transmitting the fight-or-flight impulse, a sympathetectomy, would be ineffective, aspirin for a migraine.
|
|
Of course there are intermediate treatments between the Drysol ointment and getting my sympathetic nerve cauterized—burned with a laser until it shriveled. There were pills, electric baths, even Botox injections. But I wanted the harshest, most punitive treatment. I wanted to kill hyperhidrosis dead. It was the same retaliatory impulse as with my football friend, only directed appropriately this time. And it was appropriate. Just as hyperhidrosis reshuffles people’s habits and personalities, it alters self-images. Despite what logic says, this physiological shortcoming does seem our fault: Logic never bodily slobbered on someone or ruined a relationship at the handshake. A sympathetectomy was my chance to hit redo—plastic surgery for a character flaw.
|
|
When I arrived at my appointment, my intake doctor, a tall, Filipino medical student, stumbled over what to call my condition. “You’re here about hy-per-hi …” His teeth and lips formed the syllables, and his brain could parse the Greek cognates and what the parts of the word meant. But seeing the words together sowed confusion on his face. He retreated and promised Dr. Blair would be with me shortly.
|
|
I waited without my shirt on, for once hoping my hands would be gushing, to show her I was a world-historical sweater and needed the knife. Still, I’d never had surgery before, and the after-effects of a sympathetectomy were permanent: Since the surgery kills the nerves that regulates sweat for the armpits, face, head, and hands, the body compensates by opening the faucet on the belly, groin, back, feet, and knee-pits. Pools of sweats can accumulate during vigorous activities, like sex—which seemed an unfair exchange for being able to hold someone’s hand to get sex in the first place. So, to steel myself in the little room, I repeated my mantra. “Don’t wimp out. Surgery.” It had taken a manful swallowing of my pride to admit this thing might not be the twenty-first-century equivalent of hysteria, and here I was willing to stick my insurance company with a $5,000 bill.
|
|
Then, a knock. It startled me, and my hands started. For once, they performed perfectly.
|
|
Dr. Blair, short, and with red hair ratcheted back, entered. She knew full well how to pronounce hyperhidrosis. Despite that, she extended her hand to shake mine. She later told me that knowing how moist her patients’ hands will be actually makes for less revulsion. But she works hard to not show any lingering yuck. “These are people, after all, who feel defined by this their whole lives,” she said. It’s hard to exaggerate what a humane and decent gesture that was—to have someone who you know knows what your hands will feel like shake it anyway, no mincing, no wincing.
|
|
When I mentioned surgery, she outlined the prominent side effects and gave me a folder with the names of former patients, encouraging me to write and ask if surgery had been worth it. “Some say no,” she admitted. But as soon as she’d explained the surgery, she told me I didn’t want it. Far less invasive, far more reversible, she explained, was Robinul, an aspirin-like prescription tablet. One milligram twice a day soothes the nervous system like a stiff drink, taking the edge off without incapacitating it.
|
|
Robinul wasn’t the Gordian-knot slitting I’d hoped for. No, no, I explained, I wanted the hard stuff, a medical crucifixion. She wrote me a prescription anyway, and the effete white pills I picked up two days later seemed common, unbefittingly pedestrian.
|
|
They were also enough. A week of Robinul was like quitting smoking and getting a sense of taste back: Everything bloomed in tactile pleasure, from the sharp tapdance of typing to the smooth glide of flipping through a magazine. I could touch things directly, no filmy interference. That first weekend I finished having sex with my girlfriend quickly and moved to the post-coital snuggling, stroking her hair and the arch of her neck and wrapping her whole small fist in my knuckles. “Notice anything?” I cooed, as if I’d sprung for penile enhancement. Honestly, this was probably better for her. My follow-up with Dr. Blair a month later was superfluous. I made it a point to shake her hand.
|
|
Now that my hands sweat only intermittently (once per day hard, with occasional lapses that necessitate double shots of Robinul), the deficiency I’m most embarrassed to admit is that I have to learn how to dress. To learn, as a child would, when to wear thick socks (when it’s cold and I’ll be sedentary) and when not to (when it’s cold but I’ll be active). I still grab seven hand towels to run at the gym, despite invariably—now— throwing six of them back unsullied into the laundry basin. My horror of heat-trapping sweaters (i.e., knitted wool) hasn’t abated. I haven’t gotten the eating thing down, either—how to use food like soup to warm up, or ice cream to cool down, and what meals will leave me overfull or sleepy. And shamefully, I recoil a bit at other people’s slippery handshakes. The way only people who once had terrible teeth will recoil at someone who never had braces. But every so often I can walk outside in January after a dinner out and proudly sense the cold crawling around my skin, and yet feel my hands dry and warm at the end of my sleeves. They’re mine. I walk without gloves, to test how long the warmth lasts, and I like warming someone else’s hands with my long fingers. I gave up Catholicism long ago, but I’d like to sneak back to mass sometime and try spreading a little peace.
|
|
Things aren’t perfect. If I catch myself thinking about sweating, or trying to not think about sweating, I realize again how interlocked mind and body are—words can still make my hands constrict like a tight glove, and a pleasant heat will tip into perspiration. I haven’t trained myself to control this, if I can, and it reminds me that whether or not hyperhidrosis is my fault, it feels sometimes it must be. If I sit too long in an office chair, trapping stagnant warmth with my back and buttocks, my feet begin to tingle. I feel my pores swell, and the sensation of sweating is as real to me as a phantom limb to an amputee. But often now that’s all it is, a phantom sweat. When I head to the bathroom to slip off my shoes (one at time, standing like a flamingo in the stall), instead of the expected dry-and-damp camouflage patterns, which never concealed my sweaty feet, instead of boggy odors wafting from my insoles, instead of steam baking from the leather tongue—I find a dry, brown sock. I’m told this is what normal feels like.
|
|
©SamKean
|
