A woman with a rare medical condition that means she cannot be exposed to direct sunlight and said she was afraid she'd never find love has celebrated welcoming her first baby alongside her husband.
Karine de Souza has an extremely rare skin condition called xeroderma pigmentosum, which makes a person incredibly sensitive to direct sunlight and at a much higher risk of developing skin cancer.
Her condition means she has spent the vast majority of her life indoors with the curtains drawn to avoid direct sunlight.
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In her life she's had over 200 surgical procedures to remove skin tumours, with her lower lip and the tip of her nose removed during the surgeries to remove melanoma.
Karine explained that while she doesn't feel anything in the moment if she's in direct sunlight she later ends up with lesions on her skin which need to be surgically removed.
The Brazilian woman feared that she'd 'never find love' because of her condition, but in 2018 she met her future husband Edmilson after he contacted her via social media.
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After months of messaging over Facebook they met in person and ended up getting married, and in 2020 the happy couple started trying for a baby.
Earlier this year they welcomed a baby daughter, with Karine posting to Instagram that she had 'everything I always dreamed and wanted' for.
Despite their happiness, Karine and Edmilson are sometimes targeted by trolls and they delayed announcing their happy news that there was a baby on the way until Karine was four months pregnant.
While she says there are 'a lot of good people' on social media who are absolutely lovely there are sadly some individuals who send her a 'lot of attacks' online.
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However, the trolls can't keep them down as since the birth of their daughter Zaya the happy couple have been posting about how excited they are at the joy she has brought to their lives.
They recently celebrated the first 'mesversário', marking one month since their daughter had been born, and people were lining up to offer their congratulations.
Well-wishers praised the couple for their 'beautiful' daughter and for having a 'beautiful family', while lots remarked that Zaya looked like a 'copy' of her dad in appearance.
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Others said they loved Karine's 'no nonsense attitude' towards the haters and wished them all the best in the next adventure of her life with her young family.
Joe Harker