I know, it will be so much easier once he's in that age where he'll be able to carry the epi-pen on him rather than us having to rely on other people
You'd think so, yes, but a LOT depends on the cooperation of others and the reaction threshold that your child happens to have.
How have we dealt with this?
On a not-so-awesome day, I'd answer
BADLY. And with considerable angst and stress.On a good day, that answer would be different.
We just have. Homeschooling was a no-brainer; spending this time WITH my kid, versus spending it ON HER BEHALF, and still worrying terribly every time the phone rings? No question which of those is right.Personally, our daughter has been self-carrying since she was three. This separates the idea of responsibility for CARRYING medication from the responsibility for
using it. Oh, and if you have anything to do with a public school-- get a 504 plan in writing.
My daughter's asthma has been hovering in the low yellow zone for the past 24 hours because of a 2h meeting that she and I needed to attend-- we got there and one of her allergens was EVERYWHERE in the room. Being inhalation/aerosol sensitive to an allergen makes this a whole different ballgame; she wiped everything she touched and it still wasn't enough. All but two of her systemic reactions (and there are dozens) for the past decade have been as a result of an error in judgment-- they've all been "unavoidable" and mostly as a result of someone else's actions. This includes three near-fatal reactions that we've never fully determined a cause for. In other words, the rest of the world may think we're helicopter parents, but we live the way we do for a darned good set of reasons, and we STILL see plenty of evidence that we probably
can't be "too careful" in light of what we're dealing with. Oh well. It is what it is.
On Monday, a peer at a community service event "helpfully" pulled out a bag filled with her allergen to "share" with the other participants. So yeah, I got a panicked phone call from my 13yo who was standing alone in the cold, waiting for fifteen minutes while I raced to pick her up and kept her on the phone with me so that she could tell me that she hadn't been exposed while she was frantically packing up her computer.
So yeah. They WON'T always control their surroundings any better than we can. The truth is that fleeing the room was the best of her options-- but it was far from a "good" one. She wound up standing all alone and trying to decide whether she was having any asthma problems, in the middle of a fairly deserted wooded park at the edge of a university campus.
I can turn over her allergies to someone else, all right-- HER. Because nobody else has as much on the line. That's harsh, but it's something that our kids have to learn, ultimately.
~Mom to an Anaphylaxis Frequent Flyer.
PS. Feel free to PM if you ever need to get specific advice on something that seems more allergic than GT-- or irretrievably both. I don't post about this openly here because of my DD's privacy.
