Posts tagged with schools.
Why peanut bans aren’t nuts
It was the scariest moment of my life as a parent.
My 10-year-old son struggled to breathe as they hooked him up to a heart monitor in the ER. I got a last glimpse of his bluish-grey face through the oxygen tent before a nurse pulled me out of the room. I huddled next to my husband in a hospital corridor for what seemed like a lifetime.
Finally, a doctor came out and told us that our son had stabilized. He wasn't going to die.
At least, not right then.
The doctor in the ER explained that our son had gone into anaphylactic shock. In other words, he had just experienced a life-threatening allergic reaction. We'd need to get a prescription for an EpiPen filled immediately. The doctor carefully explained how to use it, demonstrating with an empty needle how to plunge the pen directly into our son's thigh. The lunging motion of the doctor's hand somehow seemed violent to me. I wanted to tell him to stop. To shut up. That he was scaring my son to death.
And me, too.
My husband and I listened intently. I wanted to ask if I could run out to the car and get my tape recorder, something I nearly always have near me because of my work. I wanted to be sure I memorized every single thing the doctor was saying. Because my brain wouldn't stop screaming: "David almost died. DAVID ALMOST DIED!"
Fortunately, our family doctor met with us shortly afterwards and went through the whole event with us again. I had a list of everything my son had eaten that day but I already knew it had been the strawberries.
David has never liked strawberries. Unlike the rest of his siblings, David had always ignored them whenever I served them up for dessert. But that night, the night we would forever think of as The Night David Almost Died, for some reason he had not only had some of the fresh strawberries, he had eaten tons of them.
"You're wrong," said our family doctor. "He'll be tested of course, but an allergy to strawberries, especially a life-threatening one, is extremely rare."
I decided it would be impolite to insist on the spot that our family doctor was wrong. But I knew we'd never allow another disgusting strawberry to come into our home again.
I faked a calmness I didn't feel when the doctor said, "Make sure David carries his EpiPen with him everywhere. He needs to have one at the office at school, one in his book bag, at home, and make sure that all of you - including his siblings - know how to administer it."
And most important of all: "If he ever has another reaction, next time you'll have less than five minutes. Don't wait until you get him to the hospital or until an ambulance arrives. Give him the injection immediately."
After a series of exhaustive tests, involving numerous experts, it turns out David isn't allergic to strawberries. Of course. So what made his throat swell so badly that night that, as I later learned, the doctors had pushed me out of the room so they could shove a breathing tube down his throat?
Nothing. Well, nothing that has been determined. Yet.
Every test David has ever had for allergies has come back negative. In addition to all of the usual suspects, including nuts, shell fish, dairy, and wheat, David was also tested (twice, at my insistence) for strawberries. Two years later, he was tested again, and the results were exactly the same.
Our new family doctor says David might have actually outgrown whatever caused that allergic reaction, almost four years ago. "Or it could have been a fast-acting virus" claimed an allergist we brought him to shortly afterwards.
In other words, no one seems to know what really happened that day. Something made David's throat swell up so fast that suddenly, seemingly out of blue, he was struggling to breath, his face turning grey from the lack of oxygen.
That's why I'll be forever grateful for Sabrina's Law, which has led to school staff across the province being trained to recognize and deal with an allergic reaction. Sabrina's Law - the first of its kind worldwide - was the result of a horrible tragedy. And a mother's vow to her dying child.
On September 30, 2003, Sabrina Shannon died from an anaphylactic reaction after a lunch in her high school cafeteria. She was 13 years old. Her mother promised to do "whatever is possible to prevent this fate from happening to any other child."
An article in the December issue of Chatelaine magazine, "It's Just Nuts," asked the question: Are we overreacting to food allergies?
I felt the tone of the article to be a little insensitive, even disrespectful. (Though that doesn't mean I believe writers should ever be afraid to ask good questions, of course. No matter how many feathers they might ruffle. Or how many parents they might offend, myself included.)
Chatelaine has received what it describes on its website as an "unprecedented volume of responses" to the story. The reaction from parents of children with allergies, and many others in the allergy community, has been angry and swift. Some letters accuse the writer of the piece of being so misinformed, her article even threatened "the hard-won accommodations in schools to protect food-allergic children by confusing the facts and statistics."
To its credit, Chatelaine has published a rebuttal to the article from Anaphylaxis Canada, which includes a detailed explanation of what exactly it believes the article got 'wrong.'
Gwen Smith, editor of Allergic Living magazine, wrote about the controversial piece on her magazine's website. She refers to it as Chatelaine's "hit-and-run article."
I think she expressed it perfectly when she said, "It's funny how when a medical condition doesn't affect your life, you can presume that it is overblown."
(You may also be interested in this article about a potential new test for detecting peanut allergies.)
Tagged with
schools,
peanut,
anaphalaxis,
allergies
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