Allergic to water, he can’t even cry or sweat without getting bruises that burn and bleed. Tit Hansen-Smitha 25-year-old from Fresno, California, has lived like this since she was 8. Sick of aquagenic urticaria, a rare condition affecting approximately 250 people worldwide and that even prevents her from drinking. Her story bounces around the international media. A daily ordeal that pushed the girl to launch a collection on GoFundMe to be able to pay medical expenses and look to the future. Tessa dreams of becoming a nurse. “I hope to be able to go back to school again, to be able to work, to find a sense of normality in life”, she explained to the US broadcaster Abc30.
“I got out of the shower and I had huge bruises on my skin, my scalp was bleeding,” she said. Her mother Karen is a family doctor and was the first to realize her daughter’s problem, after years of tests and odysseys between specialists. And equally “I feel guilty – he confesses – for not having understood his illness much earlier”, a “rare condition” described by the National Institutes of Health as a disorder “in which hives develop rapidly after the skin enters contact with water, regardless of its temperature”. The causes of the pathology, which “affects women more commonly”, are still unknown.
If she drinks water, or eats something that contains a lot of it, Tessa feels burning. And so takes mostly milk, whose aqueous part is counterbalanced by fats and proteins. Hygiene is a feat: “Staying in the shower for more than 5 minutes, while trying not to pass out while hyperventilating when the spray hits me – he says – is not the relaxing experience that “washing” can be for others”. Yet every now and then she has to take a shower, even if she avoids activities that could make her sweat or get dirty.
The girl keeps bad odors at bay by “shaving – she said – and using deodorant where I can”, because even alternatives to water don’t help her. “I’ve cleaned my body here and there with specially designed wet wipes, but even those hurt,” she writes in an Instagram post. On social media Tessa vents her frustration and shows the patches on her skinwithout ever losing her smile despite the disease “simply getting worse”, notes the young woman.
Many don’t believe her and Tessa has to convince them, like when she was studying at the University of California, Davis campus, and “I asked people to splash water on me on purpose”, her testimony continues. When the Covid pandemic broke out, the girl returned home, where she remained until the dehydration reached the point of causing ischemic colitis and then she was admitted to hospital. During the hospital stay, complications arose, with the formation of “multiple superficial blood clots – she reported on Instagram – and at least one deep blood clot in my right arm”.
The hospitalization and subsequent rehabilitation she had to resort to left her family in debt, dealing with hospital bills of up to 8 thousand dollars. Now with the fundraising “we are struggling to pay my medical expenses and make ends meet”, is the appeal that Tessa entrusts to GoFundMe where donations have exceeded 12 thousand dollars.
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