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‘I Drank My Urine For Four Months Trying To Cure Vitiligo’ - Health - Nairaland

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‘I Drank My Urine For Four Months Trying To Cure Vitiligo’ by naijavlogcom(m): 5:53pm On Feb 09, 2013
This is the story of our Dear Ogo Maduewesi

Ogo Maduewesi went to bed that night in February 2005, and without prior notification, she woke up with a strange white spot on the inner part of her lip. She went about her regular activities for the day.

But dark-complexioned Ogo didn’t know that the light spot heralded a change, with far reaching social consequences.

Before she knew it, the spots had spread to her arm, neck and face – all on the right-hand side of her body. She was aged 30 then.

Ogo later found out from her doctor that she was suffering from a skin disorder known as Vitiligo. It is a disorder in which white patches appear on different parts of the body due to the destruction of cells that make pigment (colour) on the skin. This can affect the hair follicles, mouth, eyes, nose and some parts of the central nervous system.

However, Ogo’s mum believed that she may have been bewitched, as she had never seen anything as strange as this before. She thus prescribed spiritual solutions to the problem.

“My mum believed that it was a spiritual attack. So they kept suggesting so many supernatural cure options, which got me more confused. We disagreed a lot over the issue, because while I was learning to come to terms with an unfortunate change on my body, they were making it really scary for me,” she recalled.

She said, “I thought that it was just a severe reaction on my skin from what I ate or used. I met a doctor who told me it was fungal growth and prescribed ‘Ketoconazole’ which I used for two months with no improvement. A few more weeks went by, and still no improvement.

“Then I became concerned and was referred to a bigger hospital, to see a dermatologist where I was diagnosed. I was then sent for a series of medical tests, Kenalog injection was prescribed which I took and it affected all my joints badly. I asked questions and then I had started taking Folic Acid and B12 and felt it was the reaction, till it was made clear to me.”

Since then, she has endured embarrassing stares and subtle rejection from members of the public.

Luckily, Ogo’s arm and neck are now almost completely repigmented, thanks to nutritional supplements such as Vitamin B12, C, B5, Folic acid and a diet of vegetables and fruits.

But she travelled a long and tortuous road to this point. She recalls desperately trying out several options suggested by people, including drinking her own urine very early in the morning everyday for four months in 2006. She called it ‘urine therapy.’

“I stopped after four months, when I noticed that nothing had changed positively on my skin. The urine tasted very bitter, but I kept at it for those months as I anticipated that I would become free from Vitiligo, which had made my life really miserable,” she said.

She said the stigma was so strong that she had to walk out of employment twice, while she found it very difficult to relate freely with members of the public, whose actions showed that they were scared of her. She recalled an instance when a fruit seller refused to collect money from her because of her whitish hand.

She said, “She did not collect it until I used my left hand to give her the money. I had left my job at the time because I couldn’t cope with what was happening. I managed to get another job as a sales representative but that was worse for me with Vitiligo on my face.

“Usually, people look at my skin instead of listening to what I said. So I always felt like explaining to everyone that I was not born this way. I did not last on the job as I couldn’t just perform well. As threats began to arise on account of my poor performance and lack of concentration, I noticed that my skin depigmented further due to the stress.

“I remember a fateful day I walked into a business centre somewhere in Lagos to photocopy some documents and seated there was one strange man whom after staring at me for a while, walked up to me rubbing my face with his hands and asking with a very annoying laughter, ‘what is this little girl’?

“I was shocked at his confident arrogance, embarrassed, insulted and amazed that I asked him, Do you have to touch me to ask that question? I felt so humiliated and embarrassed that I started crying.”

Ogo also recalled an instance when a girl jumped out from a commuter bus to avoid sitting with her. She said, “On seeing my face she screamed, causing the driver of the bus to halt and she jumped down from the bus. At that point, every other person glared at me as if I had a contagious disease.”

Ogo, who has also had her fair share of disappointments in relationships, said the turning point for her was when she decided to be positive about her status.

“I had to tell myself the truth, I needed peace, needed to think constructively again. Vitiligo is here and I just have to live with it positively, while managing and fighting it. What people thought or say was not a problem anymore, because what anybody says is their own opinion and never 100 per cent accepted by all.

“I remember when a guy I was dating narrated a dream in which he saw that he had vitiligo on his arms and felt so bad in the dream that I had rubbed it on him. He thanked his stars that it was just as dream. He told me this many years after the relationship had broken up,” she said.

Having got her life back with lots of optimism, Ogo has been busy rallying people with Vitiligo to share her experiences and offer care and support to them through her initiative -Vitiligo Support and Awareness Foundation.

VITSAF is currently rated as the only organisation pushing for the right of people with Vitiligo in Africa.

June 25 is currently being advocated as World Vitiligo Day, but still awaiting ratification by the United Nations.

Ogo explained that the campaign for that day to be officially approved by the UN was to further honour Michael Jackson, who had vitiligo, though he opted for repigmentation that made his entire skin white.

Every June 25 in Nigeria, members of VITSAF take to the street to create awareness about how to manage vitiligo and overcome the socio sigma that comes with it.

She added, “From my findings and experience, Vitiligo is not contagious or life-threatening, but it disfigures looks and has serious psychological effect. The exact cause of vitiligo is unknown, but it has been confirmed that an autoimmune component plays a role in the disorder.

“A combination of genetic, immunologic and neurogenic factors is also identified. It is also possible that one or more genes may make a person more likely to get the disorder.

“I believe it is essentially genetic because I have a distant relation who has Vitiligo and I have observed the trend in some other families.”

His experience with vitiligo started earlier than Ogo’s. Tijani Osumah, a student who was then 12 years old when the skin disorder altered the proceedings of his life.

“I had lived a regular of a random teenager from a well-to-do family, private school, posh friends. To me life was just a process, a series of events taking place over time.

“Things were moving normally; nothing made much sense to me, I guess I was just as obscure as the average 12 year old. Yes, I was called handsome once, having inherited the visage of my mother, pink lips which many people craved for and yes there was a time when I was referred to as the ‘human checkerboard,’” Osumah recalled.

But on one morning he woke up from bed few tiny white patches on his skin. Like in Ogo’s account, he initially neglected it.

“I saw it as a negligible defect, something to fade away as soon. There were tiny white patches across the back of my palms and my feet; it was until a shower later that morning that

“I discovered it was all over my calves as well. I didn’t care any less; fear was the last thing on my mind. I just assumed it was going to fade away soon; but I was wrong. Over time, these little fell as started spreading, they got wider and wide,” he recounted.

He was eventually taken to the hospital to see a doctor after three weeks, where the diagnosis introduced the word vitiligo to him for the first time in his life. He had vitiligo, auto-immune, with no probable cause or cure.

“The hospital recommended steroid-based drugs. When I was given, I took out the pamphlet that came with it and read the three lines of what it was aimed at curbing and the twenty lines of side effects.

“Now the fear was starting to kick in, but what could I do? School was still going normal, well at least I thought it did, before the whispers and the questions. I missed a couple of mornings, sometimes days from school because of appointments at the hospital. But I always caught up in an hour or less. This is where the sad part started.

He said his mum also tended in the direction of herbs to cure him. He had to take cups of boiled herbs for weeks, but he didn’t get better. But before he realised what was happening, someone else had told his mother that the skin change was spiritual.

“Now I was starting to get pissed. As a Muslim, I am strongly against any form of spiritual practices, underworld, satanic or whatever they claimed sort of crap. But what could I do, it was just my word against theirs. My mother on the other hand was really starting to get worried and she cried too. At such points I succumbed to her suggestions.

“I was taken to bushes, areas that weren’t even marked on the map. I was fed with the worst sort of medicine to cure me. Some made me sleep, some made me puke, some made me grow fat, some made me grow very thin, and some made it even worse. It was all for my mother’s sake, because her tears pierce my heart,” said Osumah.

His experience affected his secondary education too as he travelled often for treatment and had to stay out of school. He recalled that his numerous trips to different parts of Nigeria for treatment almost disrupted his Junior Secondary School Certificate Examination.

“I cried myself to bed each night, saying to myself ‘it’s all for mom.’ Some progress was made; it wasn’t the money-hungry liars working, it was prayers.

“I was the most confused child there was, it all started when I was 13 and ended when I was 15. My parents and I decided to stick with the hospital. With steady treatment and unwavering faith, I have made a lot of progress. And I am gradually repigmenting.

“With confident, I grew stronger, happier, a greater zeal and even better grades, even the JSCE I was worried about was smashing, I made 9A’s from 12 classes. I went to top of my class, made student president and was an excellent debater.

“I wasn’t going to let some skin colour stop me. Yes, I go home with the stares, whispers, and questions, but after so long, I guess nothing gets to me anymore,” he noted gladly.

Vitiligo is a global skin concern. Ogo linked Saturday PUNCH up with another story of an Indian woman.

Her testimony showed that stigma could be worse in her country. She was in class two when her mother detected a small white spot on my back but she didn’t take seriously, as she was just recovering from chicken pox. But then the spots kept increasing.

That was how her regular visits to different doctors began. She got the steroid injections, used the dark thick ‘Ludermol’ oil on the spots and had half an hour under the summer Indian Sun daily.

She said, “Sometimes, there were trips to far off temples along with my parents to ask God to assist me recover from this condition. At times, there was a change of doctors, for a second opinion, or a different opinion.

“One vivid memory was seeing my mother silently cry one day when she saw a white spot on my head through my dark hair, and then she discovered one white hair strand there. I was surprised to see her cry, and could not quite understand what went wrong. These were all memories before my teenage years.”

She had her share of stigmatisation as she tried hard to be friends with other girls in school, but they would stare her and laugh in mockery. It affected her confidence level in participating in school programmes, and she eventually gave it up.

“Then I remember those difficult days when I used to be depressed, I used to cry long into the nights, feeling alone and low. I used to drift into a sleep where I dreamt of magic erasers, erasing off all my white spots.

“And then the erasers changed into a ferocious tiger chasing me in the dark, and I am trying to hide among the long elephant grasses around me…

“And I remember those difficult study hours, half awake, half asleep, knowing that I have to work hard and study and be successful, as I have to fend for myself, as I will be alone, and there will be no one for me. And thus with all these fears I grew up… and here I am today,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Chief Medical Director, University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, Dr. Abdulwaheed Latinwo, described Vitiligo as an auto immune disease.

He said there is no known way of preventing it. He said the treatment is variable and can be used to limit and reverse the disease.

“The treatment options are Psoralen, photo therapy, laser, steroid creams and important is cosmetic camouflage. Cure cannot always be achieved,” he said.
>>>More updates @ www.Naijavlog.com

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