On a weekend, while in front of a mirror at home, my brother pointed out that there was a huge white patch on my back. I strained hard to check out that it was indeed there and was puzzled at the first look of it. I thought it was a stain and even rinsed it thinking it would disappear. It was something that I had not noticed before, never in the world imagined to have, and never thought would change my life forever. My family members even assumed that it could be the onset of leprosy thanks to their limited knowledge on things. Until I visited a doc the next day, I was almost kept in isolation. This was the beginning of a riches to rags to riches again story.
I went through torture each time someone sympathized with me on the issue, each time people made me conscious about my Vitiligo. I was becoming a social and mental wreck. I stopped attending parties, or being around with friends, and at some point, even going out of home. The problem affected my work performance, family relationships and sent me into a depression for one year.
A visit to the local doc confirmed that it was the onset of Vitiligo (or Leucoderma - the problem of pigmentation of your body). What started off as a treatment schedule left me completely stressed out, battered, and wish I never wanted to live. The most common treatment for Vitiligo was the psoralen ultra violet A/B therapy (PUVA/PUVB). I was put into a compartment with 23 ultra violet tubelights for treatment sessions lasting 15 minutes to even one hour, three days a week. Not only did the treatment cost me a whopping sum, it rendered me prone to cataract and skin cancer, and mentally purposeless in life. One year on after the treatment, the patches were gone much to my relief. Only to reappear after six months of stopping treatment, in the same magnitude as before.
I decided to take up a melanocyte transplant surgery. Due to the fact that only local anaesthesia was administered for this procedure, the surgery was extremely painful and excrutiating since it involved preparation of the skin on my body to receive new skin cells. My insurance was not covered as it was labelled as a cosmetic procedure! It took a month for me to recover from this surgery and the results were only partially positive.
It is at this point that I decided that I want to change my life for the better. I stopped all treatments, and took up homoeopathy for one year to address this problem. During this time, I exposed my body to sunlight as often as possible, maintaining a salt and citrous free diet and a strict schedule to de-stress myself. I never deemed office life as stress and set my limits on working hours to set a balance between home life and office life. Since this decision, the problem has not spread, I have a wonderful family (breaking all earlier concerns that my life will be in shambles), and I have a contended and stress free life.
Vitiligo has only made me more knowledgeable, understanding, caring, sensitive to others' problems and in general a person with a huge positive outlook on my life and future.
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