1 Month, 400 Pills

Elani suffers from an immune system disorder that confines her to her bedroom and requires her to swallow vast quantities of medication

- By Robyn Lucas

It's a bright and warm autumn day outside, but in Elani Leonard’s bedroom, only a sliver of light peeks through the curtains. She’s lived like this for nearly three years, rarely leaving her room. Bright light feels like needles piercing her eyes, and the smallest task leaves her exhausted.

The 30-year-old mother of two would love to do anything other than spend her days in a dark bedroom and having to take hundreds of pills.

“It’s not easy to live like this,” Elani says. Graves’ disease, an auto-immune disorder, has enlarged her heart, caused rheumatoid arthritis, made her eyes bulge, her hands and feet swell up, and brought on anxiety, depression, mood swings, fatigue, and light sensitivity.

“It’s so depressing,” she tells YOU. “It’s like there’s no light outside of this room. It’s very difficult but I’m praying.”

She’s soft-spoken and must take breaks to catch her breath. Sometimes she’s barely audible, talking to us from her home in Pofadder in the Northern Cape.

Her symptoms started when she was just 25 and her diagnosis in 2017 hit her hard, Elani says. “I’d just finished studying. I’d just got my job, something that I dreamed of. “And then this disease came, and there was just one thing on my mind – I wanted to end my life.”