Medical workers found 13-year-old Nagina in a shed located in a rural area of Nepal. She’d been left there by her parents, who were unable to afford treatment for their daughter’s severe skin condition: ichthyosis.
By the time Nagina was discovered by these medical workers, she had seized up and was suffering from social anxiety and trauma.
Thankfully, Nagina’s rescuers took her to the Hospital & Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children and there, the doctors took her in for treatment.
Because of her ichthyosis, Nagina’s skin was either shedding at a rapid rate – or growing too quickly for her body to keep up. Both conditions cause rough, scaly skin to build up, which doctors had to begin carefully removing to actually treat Nagina’s skin.
Dr. Bibek Banskota, one of the doctors at the Hospital & Rehabilitation Center for Disabled Children, explained that Nagina’s treatment was “really a case of using creams to hydrate her skin and a lot of TLC.”
This treatment was, surprisingly, just Vaseline.
“The nurses were amazing,” Dr. Banskota recalled, “they wrapped [Nagina’s] body in Vaseline-soaked gauze every day and bathed her. She got love and care.”
After a few weeks of this treatment, Nagina had blossomed from being unable to move, reclusive, and depressed to becoming mobile and was “extremely bright” in her classes. Nagina was finally beginning to smile and make friends with her peers.
When Dr. Banskota and other doctors realized that the predominant form of Nagina’s treatment would just be Vaseline, they contacted the petroleum jelly company to provide Nagina with a lifetime supply.
Since then, Vaseline has taken the initiative to launch the Healing Project, an organization that funds, supplies, and sends medical kits to people in unsafe spaces.
