There is nothing that makes me angrier than fighting with my daughter's school about her allergies. I've heard such pearls of wisdom as "I totally understand. My daughter is allergic to milk." No, you don't "totally understand." Your daughters farts don't compare to the nights my daughter spent in the hospital, including one where they couldn't let her go home because the air is our neighborhood was too toxic because of the flowering of the nut trees planted everywhere on our block. Or the image of her little four year old face when she turned to me crying, her eyes swollen shut, her cheeks the size of baseballs because someone touched a nut, then touched her. "I told Caidyn that she needs to start taking responsibility for her own illness." First, of all, it's not an illness. It's a disability. Secondly, she's a SECOND GRADER. If you, her teacher, and the other parents are too fucking stupid to avoid tree nuts and peanuts, how do you expect her to?
And trust me, she's taken responsibility. She's the first one to ask "Does that have peanuts or tree nuts in it?" She took responsibility the night she ended up in Children's Hospital, unable to breath, and because the doctors assumed it was an asthma attack, and not anyphylactic shock, she passed out on the table and left me screaming for help. She's taken responsibility when she couldn't walk because her legs got infected (three times) because her skin broke open from her allergies.
People who believe there's such a thing as a "mild" nut allergy are just plain wrong. When Caidyn was four, this happened:
"It happened to Catrina Vonder Meulen 18 months ago, when she lost her 13-year-old daughter, Emily, to a peanut allergy while on a shopping expedition. 'The day that Emily passed away, we were at a mall in Cincinnati, buying her a graduation dress for a friend,” Vonder Meulen told TODAY’s Hoda Kotb on Thursday. “We stopped in the food court, stopped at a national chain restaurant, buying a sandwich that she had eaten probably 50 times before. There was nothing at the time that alerted us.”
Vonder Meulen and her husband, Paul, who have two other children, had known since Emily was a toddler that she had an allergy to peanuts, and Emily was constantly vigilant about staying away from them.
But, her mother said, no one in the family had ever imagined that it could be fatal."
They didn't have her epi-pen, because every attack she'd ever had was "mild." Every time the school takes my child's life in their hands (allowing parents to bring cookies, cakes, candy bars without bothering to check the ingredients) I remember Catrina Vonder Meulen. No one knows when an allergy attack will be deadly. No one knows what can happen. Why is it too much to ask for the school and other parents to make SMALL changes in order to accommodate a (DEADLY) disability that affects 3 out of every 100 students? And, most importantly, why do they have to be such douche bags about it?
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