Woman who is allergic to daylight reveals brutal impact it's had on her daily life
Kit Roberts
Featured Image Credit: This Morning
A woman who has a condition which means she can develop a painful reaction to sunlight in just minutes has opened up about how it has affected her life.
Sonal Keay is a criminal barrister and businesswoman from the UK who has a rare health condition called Chronic Actinic Dermatitis.
Many of us may have had sunburn after staying out too long, but Sonal can develop a painful rash from just minutes in the sun - a totally different scenario which has massively impacted the way she lives her life.
Sonal recalled that she had bad eczema as a child, but this has appeared to get better as she got older.
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But then when she was around 17 years old, Sonal began to get really bad skin flare ups after traveling abroad on vacation, though she had no idea at the time what had caused it.
"I suffered a really severe and painful reaction, and it just didn't clear up at all," she told Good Morning Britain.
"Every single time I was outside, every day I was in a lot of pain and discomfort. I did learn that covering up seemed to help, but I had no idea what was wrong."
Sonal said that she noticed there was a 'correlation with sunny days' with her flaring up.
Nonetheless, Sonal said she 'just couldn't understand even the mere the possibility of being allergic to daylight', adding that after all, it is 'the source of all life'.
Finally, at 18 years old, she was diagnosed with Chronic Actinic Dermatitis - the allergy to daylight.
Revealing how her condition has affected her life, she said: "Whilst I might look 'normal', so to speak, it's not the case, I don't have a normal life.
"I have to apply suncream as automatically as we would pick up our keys or put on our shoes before we leave the house."
It's not just on sunny days either, as Sonal explained that even on a cloudy day she can suffer a reaction if she's outside for 'about a minute'.
After her diagnosis was a very difficult time for Sonal as she had to learn to adjust.
"With that diagnosis I thought what am I going to do with my life, is my life over," she said.
"Even after it was it diagnosed and I learned to adjust to it, the pain and the discomfort, days of suffering, feeling so uncomfortable in my own skin."
She added: "It was literally a very dark period of my life. I've just really had to obsessively manage my own skin ever since."