I had an epiphany. In a bathroom, of all places. But it wasn’t just any bathroom. This was at a Penthouse magazine lingerie party. Considering the searing hot, scantily clad dream girls gliding about, you’d think I would have been in heaven. Instead, I was locked in a john, gunning a blow drier at the dark sweat stain on my pink dress shirt.
It wasn’t a surprise that I was dripping wet. Afflicted by a rather inconvenient condition called axillary hyperhidrosis, my armpits were always streaming. But I was appalled that my foolproof plan to conceal my sweat had backfired. Earlier in the evening I had strategically harnessed a pair of Maxi-Pads to my armpits with an Ace Bandage. Yet within an hour of my arrival at the Hollywood mansion, mutiny. My female diapers had slipped.
And that’s when it hit me. I’m not as crafty as I think. I needed to find an actual, certified cure.
I first realized that I had a sweating problem a year earlier. It was in the grip of a Brooklyn winter and I was shivering in my friend’s unheated apartment. As I flipped through a magazine, Dan, who was wrapped like a burrito in a blanket, pointed to my tee shirt and asked, “Nervous? Got the IRS after you or something?” I followed his finger to my light gray tee and discovered the two dark gray stains.
Suddenly aware of sweat trickling over my goose bumps, I fumbled for an excuse. “Nah, these shots of Paris in a bikini are hot,” I fudged. I had no idea why I was sweating. My armpits were glazed with my daily antiperspirant, and besides, I was cold. Perhaps chattering my teeth was a new aerobic workout.
For the next few days, I surveyed the shirts of all those around me. My reconnaissance mission was discouraging; devastating, actually. Not only was everyone else drier than dirt, but they didn’t even sweat when exerting themselves. Dan ripped off twenty pull-ups without a hint of moisture, but I couldn’t pull a pen from my pocket without looking like I had just bench-pressed a car. So I turned to Google.
Typing in keywords like “extremely sweaty pits,” I came across SweatHelp.org, the website for the International Hyperhidrosis Society. I wasn’t alone! Apparently I shared this condition with a whole three percent of the population. While this may seem like a high percentage to some, to me it felt like an obscure curse - something with which Stephen Hawking might even sympathize. I scanned every inch of the site on a quest for information. What causes this? Why me?
Little to nothing is known about the exact cause of hyperactive sweat glands, but research suggests that it’s hereditary. This is not surprising as I always suspected that there was something behind my mother’s conspicuous costume changes. She switched shirts so many times a day you’d think she was a pop star on tour. And since I had already inherited chronic bedwetting from my father, it only seemed fair that Mom would serve me up some sort of shortcoming.
Despite my medical maladies, I did feel marginally better about myself when I read about the hand other sweaty people were dealt. There were degrees of hyperhidrosis that sounded even more humiliating - sweaty faces or palms, in particular.
While I simply had to be smart about the colors and fabrics of my shirt or how I moved my arms, those afflicted with the facial or palmer forms couldn’t blink or shake hands without a cascade of warning signs. But there was one common sweat problem I envied - plantar hyperhidrosis, or sweaty feet. While there’s nothing at all sexy about sweaty feet, this seemed like the least of evils. Sure, your feet may rot through shoes but at least it wasn’t broadcast to the public. Secrecy was key.
Fortunately there are treatments. Super concentrated antiperspirants like Certain Dry work for some, Botox works for everyone, and endoscopic thoracic surgery will stop sweaty pits or palms in their tracks. However, ETS carries a very high risk of compensatory sweating whereby your torso or legs or some other part of your body from which you had never sweat suddenly soaks your clothes. I opted for Certain Dri.
At ten bucks per roll-on stick, the high potency antiperspirant was about a grand cheaper than Botox injections, and it promised to shrink my pores and plug sweat ducts. I applied the stuff religiously for a few months before being struck with an insufferable sweat stain on my shirt that streaked all the way down to my belt. Apparently nothing is Certain, except for axioms like “You pay for what you get.” As spring crept into summer I began to panic - not because I would sweat anymore than usual but because I could no longer conceal my sweat beneath a cocoon of clothes. I might be mistaken for a suicide bomber.
With no relief from antiperspirants and unable to afford a new Botox habit, I had to rethink my wardrobe. Cotton shirts were too revealing, so I went shopping for clothes that could keep a secret. I road-tested the shirts I liked in the dressing room, clamping them in my armpit until sufficiently wet. Then I checked to see if the discrepancy between the sweat and dry look was too sizeable. It usually was. My options were limited to black and, well, just black actually. I did buy one pink shirt for the day when I stopped sweating, but mostly I bought black and reluctantly embarked on my Dark Period. This new look wasn’t me, but it beat being that sweaty guy.
Of course, this plan wasn’t foolproof. While some shirts could conceal sweat stains from the naked eye, a wet shirt is still a wet shirt. I learned this during a music video shoot where I made a cameo walking with my arm slung over some model’s bare shoulder. She quickly recoiled and as she glanced at her glistening skin, the word Yuk slipped past her lips. I’d have to keep the sweat off my shirts to be safe.
This is what led me to fasten pads in my pits. But as the mishap at the lingerie party proved, I’m no MacGyver. The only other option was Botox. On the SweatHelp site I learned about a doctor’s conference in Huntington Beach: Hyperhidrosis Emerging Concepts and Treatments. I arranged to be their Botox test dummy.
The dermatologist painted a Betadyne solution in each armpit and sprinkled it with cornstarch – as soon as sweat hit the cornstarch it would turn purple. But strangely enough, as I lay with my hands behind my head and forty dermatologists huddled around me, I wasn’t sweating at all. At least not until the doctor informed me that my armpits were “much bigger than most patients.” Apparently I would need roughly twice as many shots – twenty-five in each armpit. My underarms wept.
“Look, there it comes! He’s sweating!” cried the gaggle of doctors as my armpits turned a Barney-esque shade of purple. “It’s pouring from everywhere!” another shouted. Their excitement made me feel like a circus freak-show, greatly aggravating my sweat glands. Within seconds the entire expanse of my underarms outed themselves as sieves. Dr. Said penned twenty-five equidistant dots in my hairy pits with a Sharpie. And then the stabbing began.
The first one burned like a bee sting and I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. Suddenly I didn’t mind sweating at all. In fact, I looked terrific in black. They complimented my pupils nicely. There was no need for the — Ouch! Oh My God! — forty-eight more jabs of the needle.
***
I’m now eight months into my new life as a dry guy. And while I feared that my sweat would be rerouted to another part of my body, it hasn’t. My days as a brooding Goth with something to hide are but a dark, distant memory, and with my brightly colored clothes I now look more like me. At twenty-nine, I have finally found freedom - albeit a fleeting one.
My Botox will inevitably wear off and my sleeping beast will awaken. I can either accept my fate or pay to change it. Since I’m cursed with more psycho-physiological pitfalls than I care to count on my nail-bitten fingers, I have that dermatologist’s number on speed dial. Sure, I’m embarking on an expensive adventure, but I’d pay anything, anything, to party with Penthouse Pets again without Maxi-Pads falling from my pits.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 2:49 PM
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