This is going to be long and vulnerable but please bare with me.

Since I was a baby I have always had eczema and overall very sensitive skin. Now as an adult (27,F) I have rosacea that’s pretty mild and never textured. However, I have had this stubborn PD come back for the past 4 winters around my nose and mouth. The first 3 years it was typically just patches of flaky dry skin that eventually cleared. This year it’s come back and is the worst it’s ever been, and I’m truly feeling hopeless and beyond self conscious.

Previously when the PD was more mild, I’d been given a steroid and it worked. But this time I had to see a totally new derm with new insurance, and he was the worst derm I could’ve seen for this condition. It has since gotten horribly red, dry, scaly, and bumpy.

His treatment: He prescribed me Cloderm, a steroid, at the beginning of November 2021. I was on it for several weeks and it had completely gone away. Unfortunately like most it came back with a vengeance like many people say in this forum!! So I returned to him about 4 weeks later and he told me to continue using it, so I did. Once the PD continued getting worse, I stopped the Cloderm and returned to him a week or so after. He then prescribed me Desonide ointment. I hated it and it felt greasy on my skin and I didn’t know that it was working because unfortunately it takes weeks to even know whether it does or not.

Since then I’ve found this Reddit page and have bought pretty much everything people have consistently mentioned (hypochlorus acid, avene cicalfate, diaper rash cream, La Roche Posay cicaplast baume b5, antifungal cream, even silver gel coming is in the mail). When I was home sick last week (which inevitably made it worse blowing my nose drying the area out even more) I gave myself a 5 day break from everything. A physician asst friend prescribed me Metronidazole cream. I’ve now been using just that 2x daily and moisturizing over it with the Avene.

It is so hard to tell what works and what doesn’t being that PD can take weeks to months to even years to go away and I’m starting to feel like I’m not sure what to continue. My face is feeling slightly dried out and now peeling after using the metronidazole cream for only one full day.

Does anyone else recommend staying on the metronidazole while my face feels dry/is peeling (or is that normal and what it’s supposed to do to heal)? Or using any of the other products mentioned above - is there a sequence I should be using? This is such a frustrating condition and I appreciate anyone reading this and offering advice. THANK YOU 😊