I lie on a bed wrapped in thick black felt from head to foot, one portion of my upper arm exposed, while a huge angled lamp, warm like a miniature sun, plays different frequencies of light upon my naked skin.
“It’s my face that reacts,” I say to the technician, after she has unwrapped me. “Not the rest of me, thank goodness.”
“Oh, everyone has light testing,” she replies. “Just to eliminate things. It’s routine.”
She gets me to sit upright, this time with my back exposed, and draws a grid on it with black felt-tip pen. She fires a particular frequency into each square using a smaller, more focused device. I can see what is happening in a mirror—there is green light and blue light and orange light and red light.
“It’s my face,” I say again, but this does not seem to be important at this stage.
“You can discuss your results with the consultant tomorrow,” says the technician.
I get dressed, put on my hat, and mask up for the journey home.
DR. OCELOT IS a very typical consultant. He is tall and well-made, with regular features and piercing eyes. He has thick, sleek, executive hair, distinguished silver in colour. He has an obsequious student with him in his consulting room, short, pudgy and asymmetrical, but who clearly hopes one day to gleam and glare like his mentor.
“According to your results,” drawls Dr. Ocelot, flipping through papers on his desk, “you don’t have lupus, porphyria or XP, which are the usual causes of light sensitivity. Will you describe again what the problem seems to be?”
I go through what has happened to my face, how it first reacted to computer screens, went on to fluorescent lights, and is now giving me trouble with daylight. I demonstrate my hat and mask.
“And what exactly are the symptoms you experience?”
I explain about the burning and indicate the red patches.
“And what precisely do you mean by burning?”
I am starting to lose patience. Why is the default setting of doctors always disbelief? Do they really think I’ve jumped through hoops to get here merely because of some minor discomfort? Or that I’ve travelled to the clinic in my outlandish gear as some sort of exhibitionist fashion statement? Even the student is practising his sceptical expression, modelling himself upon the master.
I say, “It is like someone is holding a blowtorch in front of my face.”
That gets them. There is an interval of shocked silence; the image seems to have punched through the professional barrier between us, to have made them feel what I am feeling, if only for a moment.
Dr. Ocelot leans back in his chair, steepling his fingers and gazing at the ceiling. “We do occasionally come across cases like this,” he acknowledges. “The diagnosis is light- and computer-exacerbated seborrhoeic dermatitis. It is not clear what causes it. I am going to prescribe beta blockers to reduce blood flow, steroid creams and an antifungal wash. Come back and see us in six to eight weeks. You won’t be seeing me, though. I am going to take up a post in the USA. You will be in the care of my colleague, Dr. Scrivener, whom I think you met briefly yesterday.”
I did. Dr. Scrivener is much younger, slim and neat with thinning hair. He has a gentle pink-and-white complexion and an air of genuine benevolence and concern.
I avoid smiling only by forcibly holding down the corners of my mouth.
Later, I leave the hospital pharmacy, weighed down with pills and unguents in several paper bags.