Like most 16-year-old boys, Mithun Chauhan’s mind is occupied by three things: Going to school, playing with his friends and meeting girls.
But after a rare genetic condition left his body covered in large swollen lumps, he has convinced himself that he is destined to go through life alone.
Mithun spends his days at home because his swollen face frightens locals, who have branded him ‘Ghost Boy’. He cannot go to school because other children flee when they see him.
‘Why have the gods condemned me to a life like this?’ the teenager said through the inflamed lumps around his mouth.
‘It is because of the way I look that my friends have abandoned me. Now nobody wants to play with me.
‘It because of my looks that I cannot go to school or simply take a stroll in the neighbourhood.’
Mithun’s parents are desperate for him to get an education but until his condition is treated no schools will accept him as a student for fear he ‘would scare away the normal kids’.
He was admitted to a local primary school aged eight but on his first day, the children were revolted by the sight of him.
His family from Navada in Indian, claim the sores spread across his body after a doctor prescribed the wrong medicine to treat a painful mole when he was five.
The swelling around his face grew so severe that he struggles to eat, see and breathe.
‘After taking the medicine, Mithun’s face started swelling. His entire body turned red like copper,’ said his father Ramji Chauhan.
Ramji and his worried neighbours feared that his son had been ‘cursed’ by the gods, so they prayed every day and performed rituals to cure him.
It was not until he was taken to Dr Ashwini Dash, that he was diagnosed with neurofibroma, a rare genetic disorder that causes tumours to grow along nerves.
There is no known cure for the most severe form of the disease, which afflicts around one in 33,000 people, but Indian doctors believes Mithun can be cured.
‘It only warrants surgery if obstruction of eye, mouth nose or natural orifices obstruction is there,’ Dr Dash told MailOnline.
