I think one thing that would help is just talking to your partner and explain to them what HS is and let them know "Hey, this is something that I'm still trying to figure out how to live with." Answer any questions they have. If they can see pass it then you can too. Scars are nothing but battle wounds and they are what make us unique! You are more than you scars. And if anyone makes you feel less because of a condition you have then they can fuck off and they aren't worth your time.

Have you heard of the book, "Hidden Plague" by Tara Grant. I am trying it now hoping for some relief.

I'm now 26 and I didn't develop hs until I was 19. For me it has gotten slightly better, but it's a struggle as far as confidence goes. However my fiance is aware of my skin conditions. I only use dove unscented soap, hope I helped :)

I went into remission once, for about a year and a half. I have no idea what made it go away, but it came back during my first pregnancy. I keep thinking about it and maybe it was because of weight loss & gain. I don't know! I wish I did..

I first got hs at 14 I am now 29. Me and my partner have been together since I was 18 and he is very supportive even giving me the name lumpy legs. My main problem area is my inner thighs. I also get hs under my breasts at times. Being around your age when me and my partner got together I understand how you feel I felt the same way. I remember we had arranged to go out and then stay at his and at the time I had a particularly bad break out and was struggling to walk normally without doing a John Wayne!! After a few drinks I just blurted it out to him that I had this thing that hurts like shit. Leaves me with scars and is pretty gross. At first he looked lost for words then he was asking questions about it........great conversation in the middle of a pub! But from then on he was so supportive he can now even recognise my " trying to walk normal walk" which I must say I have mastered after 15years of having this. What I'm trying to say is you just need to be honest if you believe you have met the one. I find when I eat healthy and drink lots of water this really helps breakouts

Hi, I cut off dairy mostly milk, baked potatoes, bread... Mostly the things you can associate with starch or consider 'inflamatory' for ex. chicken wings and it really helped me.

It took about 5-6 months to see some real changes but It's been almost 2 years that I don't have any abcess and my previous lumps are now just scars. I also stopped drinking soda and start drinking more water..

That's what I did, I'm not sure if that is the exact reason but now my hidradenitis is minimum.

I just left a larger post explaining a little bit more its called ''My solution'' I'm 24 got HS in 2010

I take a 500mg turmeric suppliment twice daily, you can find that with vitamins. I also wash the area with hibicleanse in my daily shower, you can find that at any pharmacy/drugstore. When I notice a flare I put a turmeric cream on it called "Vicco", I buy that on Amazon and its super affordable. The flare shrinks dramatically overnight, i love the stuff! I put on the cream before i go to bed and put a bandage on it.

I think I have a partial remission maybe? I've had HS 12 years and for almost 10 years I've had no appreciable sinus tracts, which were originally the bulk of my symptoms. I'm tempted to credit this to my doctor using simple old-fashioned antibiotics (protein synthesis inhibitors?) in contrast to a number of the antibiotics receiving attention in HS lately, although it still isn't entirely clear what some efforts may be doing wrong that they can't seem to put an end to a Staphylococcal infection.

(Staphylococcus - very possibly OTHER than Staph. aureus/MRSA - is so common in HS bacteriology that it still stands to take a great deal of blame for HS including having what may still be a monopoly on Stage 1 HS).

Possibly they would be better off going after 1 or 2 infections at a time rather than all at once, because that seems to be what happened to work in my case compared to even some of the most exciting HS research where they seem to insist on going after gram- or anaerobes with metronidazole at the same time they're going after other things with rifampacin or clindamycin, which seems to give good results but not necessarily improvements that the patients get to keep.

My HS does seem to be a lot more manageable and somewhat less severe the last two or three years. I wanted to credit improved stress management but some doctors stress me out enough I'm not sure I really have that - maybe it's more likely I know and avoid my triggers better than I used to, or some supplement is doing me more good than I know?

My problem now would be different infections remaining that don't respond so well to antibiotics, whatever they are exactly. I'm still having troubles getting doctors interested after some of the literature they've read which may still leave a lot to be desired.

If I could boil down what went wrong with my trip to an infectious diseases specialist earlier this year, it may be that doctors are using the wrong diagnostic criteria - normal vs. biofilm or normal vs. MDR? - and expecting different behavior from infections than the infections may actually be showing. That may well be part of how the specialist managed to talk himself out of the idea of my being infected even with symptoms starting him in the face (that and him reading stuff on HS that's way out of date and refuses to recognize the role of infection even when studies consistently find characteristic infections).

Other than that, I'm not sure who's achieved remission. In the literature, the expression is sometimes used rather loosely - the reader may take it to mean remission as in the symptoms improving but if you really get in there and read the fine print, it may have often been used to mean only that the symptoms stopped getting worse.

There are a few cases in literature of cases clearing up or at least becoming "inactive" and staying stable but I don't think we have good follow-up - if any of those cases came back or got worse again 2 years after they improved, it simply may not have been published.

Sorry that isn't likely much help in the here and now but hopefully considerations like these will still help keep someone from getting stuck with HS for life. It can be hard to give advice to one another because we often respond to things in very different ways - part of that may be that different combinations of infections or different strains of infections may react differently, sometimes it may involve more individualized things like having an allergy to your HS triggers or sensitivity to certain foods like nightshades, that others may not necessarily share.

Sometimes it's good to proceed cautiously with new things as you don't want to find out something is one of your triggers or that it gives you side-effects, by taking a bunch of it and having a massive flare.

Read Tara Grant's book "the hidden plague". It can help you identify triggers to your HS outbreaks. I did the auto immune protocol diet (AIP) she recommends and figured out that anything made with wheat or wheat flour is my trigger. As long as I do not eat anything that contains wheat my HS stays dormant/in remission. AIP is not something you do everyday from now on. It's just a tool used to identify if any of the common food auto immune trigger culprits are at work in your body. Once you identify your triggers, you simply don't eat those foods but all the others are fair game. It took me a long time to get to the point of trying AIP because I thought how could food I've eaten for 30+ years be the problem? But that's the way autoimmune responses work.

Good luck to you!

I completely understand I am in the same boat I was diagnosed at 11 no one in my really understands what it's like to go through this and my boyfriend is the only other person that really knows about what I go through and he is very caring and down to earth about it... He knows why I don't always feel beautiful but he makes me know he loves me and that's not gonna change just because of what I deal with