Unretouched
Part One: Sophie
My daughter, Sophie, is eight years old, and she is the most beautiful person I have ever seen.
I know every mother says that. I don’t care. It’s true.
She has dark curly hair that refuses to stay in a ponytail. She has big brown eyes with lashes so long that strangers comment on them in the grocery store. She has a gap between her front teeth that whistles when she says words with an s in them.
And she has vitiligo.
If you don’t know what vitiligo is, I didn’t either until Sophie was four.
It’s a skin condition. The cells that make pigment in the skin stop working in certain places. Nobody knows exactly why. It’s not contagious. It doesn’t hurt. It isn’t dangerous.
But it leaves white patches on the skin. Smooth, pale, irregular shapes, like spilled milk on a dark table.
The first patch showed up on Sophie’s left hand when she was four.
A small white spot on the back of her knuckle, about the size of a pea. I thought it was paint. I tried to wash it off in the bathtub.
It didn’t wash off.
By five, there was another one on her elbow. By six, a patch around her right eye that looked a little like a butterfly. By seven, patches on her knees, her neck, the back of her other hand, and a white streak through her eyebrow.
Our dermatologist at Vanderbilt, Dr. Okafor, sat with me in a little exam room and explained it gently.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s not anything you did or didn’t do. It’s genetic, partly. It often runs in families.”
“Nobody in our family has it,” I said.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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