Libby Huffer was 5 years old when she was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 1, a rare disease that causes noncancerous lumps on the skin.
She lived a normal life until her teens. Then the first hundreds of lumps appeared, and with them came the bullying. Her classmates thought she was contagious and started calling her ‘lizard breath’. It was so painful that she stopped going by Elizabeth and introduced herself as Libby, so she would never have to hear that name again.
In 1993, while she was pregnant with her daughter, hormones caused the tumors to multiply until there were thousands. Today, at 44, she estimates there are more than 5.500, from her forehead to her feet, and she lives with chronic pain. She has undergone ten operations to remove them, but surgery did not solve the problem: some tumors grew back.
Her last hope is a specialized treatment that could remove thousands of them in a single five-hour session. To raise the money, Libby did something she had avoided for decades: show her skin in public. She lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and says she no longer plans to hide.