Zara Hartshorn, A Fifteen Year-old Girl With an Aging Body
Have you ever seen the movie ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ starred by Brad Pitt? The film which was an adaptation of a book published in 1922 presented a unique story of a boy named Benjamin who was born as an old man in his physical form.
The story is fiction. But, in the UK, a similar story happened to a 15-year-old girl named Zara Hartshorn. If Benjamin growed old backwards to becoming a baby, Hartshorn grew up extra fast beyond her age.
The premature aging made Hartshorn, who is still 15-year-old, has the physical appearance of women aged about 45 years old. Doctors diagnosed that she had lipodystrophy, a rare disease that only affects an estimated of 15 people in the world.
The condition makes her body age faster. Not only that it causes wrinkles all over her skin, at a very young age, she also had to struggle with the fragility of bone and teeth.
With her old appearance, Hartshorn tries to enjoy her youth. She continued to build the spirit of being mocked by people around her who calls her ‘grandmother’. She also learned to adapt when being unaccepted by the environment of her age.
“It sometimes makes me very angry, but I always try to do things that normal kids age 15 years do, I try not to miss my youth,” she said, as quoted by mirror.co.uk.
She experienced a lot of bad experiences. She was once thought as a school teacher, she was also prohibited from riding the school bus because she was not believed to be a student. “Growing up with lipodystrophy have been really bad,” she said.
She was frustrated with the various methods of rejuvenation. In 2010, she did collagen injections with an expert in Japan. Wrinkles soon spread back in a matter of months. She began to lose teeth one at a time.
“Now I more accept myself, I should be able to see there are people worse than me,” says Hartshorn.
Tagged with: lipodystrophy, Premature Aging, Zara Hartshorn, Zara Hartshorn aging, Zara Hartshorn lipodystrophy, Zara Hartshorn premature aging,
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