So did anyone else’s skin decide to go back through puberty once you became pregnant, or was that just a cruel joke nature decided to play on me? And not really on my face so much, but I was blessed with the red-headed stepchild of skin problems – backne. Yep, that’s right. Zits on my shoulders and upper back. Gross!
Fortunately backne has never really been an issue I’ve had to deal with, aside from the occasional random blemish here or there. But once I became pregnant? Holy shit. It was like the skin of every pubescent teenager decided to take up residence on my upper back. It was so nasty. I was like what the hell is this? Where are all these pimples coming from? It was disgusting. I started using those Noxema cleansing pads to try and combat it. You know, those round ones that come pre-soaked in their own zit-zapping juice? The ones that reek and sting if you swipe them over broken skin? Yeah, those. Those that you probably haven’t even given a thought to since you were about 15. At least I hadn’t, anyway.
This lovely phenomenon lasted for pretty much the entire first trimester. I can’t remember exactly when it began, but I think it was fairly close to being from the get-go. And I know it lasted until at least March, so that would be a little ways into the second trimester as well. We went to St. Thomas for a vacation that month, and the backne was still plaguing me. I think it was beginning to finally go away at that point, but there were still some remnants. My mom even noticed my shoulders and asked me if it had started when I got pregnant, because she experienced the same thing. Some of the bumps were just awful, too. Like big and painful. Sorry, truth hurts sometimes. And so did those horrible zits. Fortunately the tan I got down there helped mask them, instead of continuing to appear as giant volcanoes on my pasty white Wisconsin winter skin.
It was so odd, too, how it was gone by the time my pregnancy was over. Thank god. Hormones, gotta love ’em.