Zain Verjee: I battled rare skin disease for three decades and won

Ms Zain Verjee. Photo/CORRESPONDENT 

In Summary

• International Kenyan news anchor speaks of the pain and challenges of dreadful skin condition

By Zain Verjee

I have spent more than a decade of my professional career on international television, my face visible to millions each day. Yet I have spent a lifetime hiding.

For years, I guard a painful secret: I can’t bear to look in the mirror.

I have fish-like scales. There are tiny red islands floating on the surface of my skin. They combine to create continents with jagged surfaces. They turn black and start to smell. There is blood and pus.

My scalp spits out silver flakes. My ears are filled with crusts. I leave white specks wherever I sit. I float in long, loose clothes. My hands betray me. The sores sit openly.

My nails are dented with pockmarks. I find strands of hair on the sheets and pillowcases every morning.

I suffer from psoriasis. It has ravaged my body since I was eight. At its worst my plaques look like leprosy. I feel like a leper.

“Please can you leave the pool” a woman once told me when I was 22, visiting the Dead Sea in Israel, “we’re not comfortable with you in it.” She is horrified at my body. I am ashamed. I hang my head.

The landscape from my neck down is chaos.

My face is flawless. Compliments are endless. But I am acutely aware that a horror film unfolds in secret beneath my clothes. I am effervescent and radiant on the outside and rotting inside. Which is the real me?

The cameras fire up, the red light turns on. I am splendidly made up. I lose myself in the moment. I am energized. I am focused. It’s only my face. It is floating. It’s all that exists. It gives me confidence.

ROCK BOTTOM

No one has it all. I fight my body and myself all my life. I hit rock bottom many times because of my disease. It seems futile to try any more.

“Who will ever want me like this?” I cry hysterically at home. “No one could ever touch me.” My mother pulls me out of self-loathing and defeatism. When I want to give up, she will not let me.

She becomes an expert on psoriasis. She reads medical journals and approaches alternative healers. She takes me for acupuncture and hypnosis.

She mixes various acids in a lab for me to use on my skin and soaks me in a tub full of Dead Sea salt. The rest of the day, I am in a messy, smelly cream. Endless personal research, trial and error bring occasional relief.

Imagine the nightmarish teen years. I cower from close friendships. No one can know the truth. I never date. Intimacy is out of the question. I have no sensation of touch. The scales are too thick.

The itch is unbearable. I scratch back and forth until there is blood. It is too raw to do any more. I am filled with rage and humiliation.

So I disappear in my head, create fictional stories and characters.

Somehow, my imagination takes me far. I am in my early 20s, and it’s the beginning of my career. I am anchoring the prime time shows in Kenya. Tonight is a big opportunity. My game face is on.

I’ve spent the afternoon on hair and make-up. As I settle into the anchor’s chair, I hear the faint rustle of plastic shrink wrap. I have wrapped up my legs and torso in the clingy film after soaking my scales in Vaseline so that the pain is lessened and the putrid smell contained.

The director calls out. The floor manager cues me. The lights on, news copy in my hands, I smile and welcome millions of Kenyans into the studio.

The contrast is sharp -- behind closed doors, I have given up. I am on the floor. I am crying, screaming and itching insanely. My mother cries. I rarely see her cry. The last time was when my grandfather died.

A family friend approaches mum. “Your daughter looks unwell. She is losing her hair. What is the matter?” My mother, at her wits end, tells the woman the truth. “George,” the angel says. “Tell her to go to George.”

HAD ENOUGH OF DOCTORS

George is a small town in South Africa. I learn there is a clinic that specialises in treating severe skin disease. I adamantly refuse. I have had enough of doctors, hospitals, foul smelling topical creams and hopes dashed. Mum convinces me.

In a week, I find myself there against my wishes. I withstand the indignity, once again, of being naked, the grotesque lesions under neon light, and I listen to the shocked gasps of the doctors and nurses.

“We’ve never seen it this bad,” one says in the tiny examination room.

Who could imagine where I am? I am a celebrity in Nairobi, making it big.

“What do you do?” I am asked.

“Nothing,” I respond curtly to anyone who dares make conversation with me. What would my viewers on KTN and listeners on Capital FM Radio think of me?

Mind, body and spirit are the focus at this clinic.. I am told to do meditation, deep relaxation and creative visualisation three times a day.

BRAINWASH MYSELF

“Every day in every way I am getting better and better. I have no desire to eat the foods I know are bad for me...” I brainwash myself. It works.

I eat yogurt or bran for breakfast, salads or fish for lunch and chicken for dinner. Nothing tastes good. I yearn for Tabasco. I drink only herbal tea and torrents of water.

I write a long letter to my psoriasis, describing how it causes me pain, how it hurts my relationships, how it makes me weak. Then I thank my psoriasis. It has taught me to have no vanity, more compassion and to withhold judgment.

I take a shovel, pick a spot outside and dig deep. I place the letter into the hole. I plant a tree. I use my hands to touch the earth. Nature seems surprisingly reassuring.

In this instance, I bury my past. I have said everything I needed to say to my skin. The tree will give life, oxygen. Perhaps it will give me a chance to breathe again.

It has been two weeks, and I see something no one else can see — a tiny shift. In the centre of one thick plaque, there is a slight thinning.

This small success galvanises me to stick rigidly to the tough diet I have promised to undertake.

I return to Nairobi with a new mindset, a sense of control. I maintain the regimen like a military staff sergeant.

Every 28 days, I see progress. It is small. But it is there. The months pass. The smell stops. The centres of the lesions disappear, they turn from red to pink to white.

I watch with awe the metamorphosis of my skin. The scales no longer build. Then they are gone. I can’t believe it.

It has been six months. I am clear. I am in remission. I have no scales. I am normal. I am finally free.

And there is no medication. Only food. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”

When I walk triumphantly into my dermatologist’s office, she is startled. I healed myself with the power of my mind, I announce. She is shocked. She later tells me she believes there is a place for natural healing in medicine.

I can’t say what will work for others, but I believe that diet, mindset and a wonderful support system were the best long-term answers for me. There is a place for light therapy or steroid cream or biological medication, but back then I healed myself from the inside out.

Zain Verjee’s psoriasis went into remission for 10 years. She still battles the condition today. (CNN)