The backstory, part one

I've often said that I've always had bad skin.  This is not strictly true.  

When I was very young, I had no sign of any kind of eczema or rash beyond the usual sort of things that you pick up in the course of a fairly standard, playing in the mud, small town sort of childhood.  This was before the days of baby proofing, far enough back that when my mom was considered some kind of political radical for breast feeding us as children, rather than feed us formula from a bottle.  Ahh, those go-go Reagan 80's.  Then, during the winter of age four, I picked up a ringworm infection on my right thumb.  We went to a paediatrician, got medication for it, treated it, and it went away.  But every winter afterwards, I would get a spreading eczema from that very spot.  It would fade in the spring and the summer, return in the fall and winter, and that was how things went for years; occasionally I would get a patch of eczema somewhere else, but it was otherwise confined to my right hand until my late teens.