Just stop provoking them!

While I was attending school I was told by several teachers that they couldn't help me with the bullying I was experiencing because I had provoked my tormentors. If I would simply relax about the whole peanut thing no one would have to hurt me and everything would be fine. 

I still can't help believing that it was my fault. 

My clothes weren't nice enough. I couldn't wear makeup or dye my hair. I wasn't pretty enough or didn't study hard enough or didn't do enough to hide my allergies. And so it was my fault because I'd provoked them. 

And I'm still sorry.

Am I allowed to cry?

When I was in seventh grade I had a bad allergic reaction while shopping with my father in a store that had several open bins of peanuts. My throat burned and I had trouble breathing, and although I took Benadryl, showered, and changed my clothes, I coughed for the rest of the night. The next day I was terrified to go to school. In the past I'd tried to talk to my teachers about class parties or snacks that were going to be provided during standardized testing, and they'd brushed me off or told me not to worry so much or, in one case, assured me that it would be okay, then later pulled me out of the test because they'd been wrong, but threatened to call my mother when I cried about it. I never wanted to have another allergic reaction, and I didn't know how I could go into a place that wouldn't let me protect myself.
My mother talked to my assigned counselor and to the office staff while I clutched her jacket, thinking that she might relent and take me home if I acted childish enough. I was twelve, and after she'd left one of the adults snapped at me to knock it off. They'd promised my mother that I could spend the day alone in a classroom and have all my work brought to me, and that they would try to work through this with me, but the teacher who was supervising me got in my face and threatened me in a low and deadly voice when I put aside my math to write a poem, and scornfully told me that I wasn't fooling anyone when I started to cry.
The same things happened when I was bullied, when I was afraid to attend a certain class. I would be sick and in pain and never, never want it to happen again, but when I said I was scared I was told, "No you're not. You only want attention, and everyone knows it."
I don't know how to deal with the things I'm feeling now, when I think back to when I was going to school and wonder if people at college will treat me differently, because I've half-believed for years that they were right. That I wasn't really traumatized, that I'm still not, and that I'm just trying to manipulate people for attention. I try not to let people see me when I'm emotional, because what if they realize I'm trying to manipulate them? But don't I have real emotions too? Am I ever allowed to cry?

Oooh, I'm embarrassed.

Poodleface and I went to see a display of Christmas trees in town, and for the second time, someone snuck up on him and startled him enough that he barked.
I am so embarrassed.
This time instead of an adult creeping toward him at a museum it was a small child who ran two circles around him before leaning over and trying to see his jacket. I probably wouldn't be quite as embarrassed, but only a few minutes before I'd been explaining to an event coordinator that my dog is a service dog and has to be allowed in.
I know this isn't my fault, but I feel like somehow it is.

Not good

Here's an article I found this morning. It talks about the recent rise in food allergies in children.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/25/health/plastics-perfumes-new-allergies/index.html?hpt=he_c2

I don't like where this is headed. I can say from experience it's very difficult for two people, both with severe allergies, although to different things, to spend time together without making each other sick. I'm not sure how the world will function if this gets much worse.

There aren't enough exclamation points in the world

I get to have candy corn. Incredible, right?
I made a post some months ago about how I could no longer find a brand of candy corn that didn't manufacture on the same equipment that also processes peanuts, and just recently a woman called brilliantmindbrokenbody gave me a link to a site that sells it! I ordered some, and it's delicious! It's perfect! I love it! Thank you!
 http://www.peanutfreeplanet.com/Sunrise_Candy_Corn_p/sunrisecandycorn%209oz.htm

How far am I allowed to go?

While I understand that my school's reluctance and in some cases flat-out refusal to accommodate me for the sake of their convenience was wrong, I have to wonder if they did have a point. Things like regularly wiping down surfaces and reading the label on everything I eat might seem normal to me, but to other people look ridiculously extreme. And do I actually have a right to say that no one around me can eat peanuts ever?
Adults glared at me when I asked them to bring the class candy from one brand and not another, and while that might be somewhat justifiable, where am I supposed to draw the line? I wanted to attend parties, but I didn't want to inconvenience anyone. I didn't know what to do. I still don't.
I panic a little whenever I read about legislation for better allergy policies in schools. "Don't these people know that's inconvenient and annoying? The school officials are going to frown and cross their arms at them! They'll be intimidated! What do they think they're doing???" But that's a stupid response, and I know it's a stupid response, and yet I can't help it because I don't know how far I'm allowed to go.
At what point would you be angry with me?

Rescuing Sage

My mother has always loved dogs and always wanted one, but my father doesn't like them, which is why I was so surprised when he was the one who suggested I have a service dog. My mother hated that she couldn't always give attention to Poodleface, so after I'd had him for a few years my father and I talked it over and agreed that my mother should have a dog too. She decided that she wanted another standard poodle, that she wanted to adopt it from a shelter, and that she wanted to train it to be a therapy dog.

We live in the middle of nowhere and no one nearby had recently rescued any poodles, so she looked at online shelter sites for almost a month before finding the dog she wanted. Her name was Sage. She had brown fur, was three years old and very even-tempered, and had been dropped off at the shelter when, supposedly, she became too expensive to feed. The shelter workers said she was still producing milk and was acting like her puppies had just been taken away, which made them think she came from a puppy mill. Sage seemed perfect; she was in need of rescuing and she had the right temperament to be a therapy dog. There was only one problem. She was in Texas.

Before we could adopt Sage we had to know if she got along with Poodleface, because no matter what happened, Poodleface had to stay. I needed him. So the two of them had to meet. Poodleface had to go with my mother to Texas. And since Poodleface was my service dog and wasn't used to taking commands from my mother, I also had to go to Texas. 

This was just before Easter, and because we were planning to leave only a few days after we'd seen her on the website, there wasn't time to prepare the camper. We were going to have to stay in hotels. I'm uncomfortable with traveling that way because I'm allergic to so many things, and without the camper I wasn't going to be able to prepare my own food. I compensated by filling a backpack with instant macaroni and hoping our rooms would have microwaves. 

We drove

   and drove

      and drove

         and drove. I saw a toll road for the first time, and an amusement park in a city big enough it just stayed were it was instead of packing up and moving every week. I met several people with thick Spanish accents who didn't know what a service dog was, and a lot of people who were helpful and called me "hon." It was weird; no one was nasty about my dog, they were either supportive or uninformed. It kind of freaked me out; I was used to being harassed. 

Poodleface traveled well and behaved himself in hotel rooms, and he ate dog food and chewed rawhides that I left in the back seat for him every morning. I filled a dog dish from my water bottle while we were driving and held it back to him so he could take a drink, and when we stopped for gas we got out and walked around. He sniffed lots of new and interesting things, and in bigger cities with more people he found lots of places to signal on. He was great.

And so was Sage.

We took her home.

For her first few weeks with us she was the most shaky, traumatized dog you ever saw. She loved to be petted and hated to be left alone, and when no one was hugging her she'd take naps under the piano bench. When my mother sat down somewhere she'd get under her chair, and the first time she met my father she shook like a leaf. Her pads were ridiculously soft and she didn't know how to run, and she hoarded Poodleface's toys in her bed whenever he left them out. I laughed my head off when I found her sleeping in Poodleface's bed, with Poodleface curled unhappily on the floor because she'd piled hers with not only every toy she'd been able to get her teeth around but also a ball of yarn and a pair of my father's socks. 

She calmed down wonderfully, though. Now she doesn't sit under the furniture anymore and doesn't panic when she's left alone in the house. She loves to meet new people and let them pet her, and my mother is indeed training her to be a therapy dog. I hope she gets her license. She'd be perfect.

Can you not do that, please?

There are a lot of little things people do that really bother me, but that I feel I can't mention because they sound so silly. A rather extreme example of this was a woman in one of the college classes I've taken at the local university center.
It was the first day of class and we were all choosing our seats. I went to sit in the back, which is one of the things I try to always do because it makes things easier on Poodleface. If I'm at the back of the room none of my classmates will need to walk by me, which greatly reduces the chance that Poodleface will be tripped over or stepped on, and also makes it easier for everyone in the room to ignore him.
A woman in yoga gear and with long blond hair (I never learned her name) came in and started looking around for a seat. When she saw Poodleface her eyes grew wide and she immediately sat down in the seat in front of me, turned herself backwards, and started watching my dog. I expected her to hold out her hand to him or try to whisper something, and after a minute of this I was beginning to pray she would, so that I could tell her off and get her to turn back around. But she didn't. She was just...staring. The instructor came in and introduced himself and started talking, but she didn't turn back around. She was still staring at my dog! Not moving, just staring, barely blinking, with her mouth open! I had a half-dozen snarky comments I was dying to make, but she hadn't done anything to be besides thoroughly creep me out, so I stayed silent and squirmed uncomfortably. Almost ten minutes into the class the teacher passed out a worksheet to see how much we already knew, and this seemed to break the spell. She turned around, and you could've cleared the leaves off your front lawn with my sigh of relief. But then she finished her worksheet and went back to staring at my dog.
I'd had enough, and I asked her what she was doing. She beamed at me and told me that my dog was amazingly well-behaved, and so cute, and she just loved him, but that I shouldn't worry because she wasn't going to try and touch him. All I could think of to say was, "Can you...not....please?"
She turned back around, but for the rest of the semester she'd turn around and watch my dog whenever she was bored.
Please don't stare at me, I hate it, and if you absolutely have to stare maybe you could close your mouth?!?

Applause for the pleasant security guard

On our vacation we stopped at a mall, and at that mall I bought some wonderful pants and a shirt. The pants were wonderful because they were marked as 'tall' and thus fit my legs without requiring a belt. Our unpleasant little town is too small to stock such things, but this entry really isn't about pants, so I'll get on with it now.

While at the mall I was approached by a security guard who wanted conformation that Poodleface was a service dog. He approached me with a smile and phrased his question politely. I politely responded that yes, he was a service dog, and that I had his license with me if the guard wanted to see it. He assured me that wasn't necessary and told me to have a nice day. And that was it. 

Here is a list of everything the guard did right:

• He quietly approached me instead of flagging me down and making a scene
• Instead of being confrontational he addressed me politely and used a pleasant tone
• He didn't demand to know the type of service dog, type of disability, or anything more than what he was legally allowed to ask
• He didn't attempt to touch or interact with my dog in any way
• He didn't attempt to make conversation about dogs and let me immediately return to shopping
• He treated me like a person instead of a liability to be cleared up

Never have I met a person more reasonable about service dogs than the pleasant security guard. I take my hat off to the pleasant security guard. I thoroughly applaud him, and I wish him well in all his future endeavors. This world needs more pleasant security guards. 

Irritating

Annoying double standard: It's okay to say "Look, a service dog!" but not okay to say "Look, a wheelchair!"

I'd like to speak to your manager. Unless he has the same accent.

Poodleface and I had been to Texas once before, when my mother wanted to rescue a poodle named Sage she'd found on a shelter website.
I don't think I've talked about Sage.
Sage is a former puppy mill mommy that my mother wants to train to be a therapy dog. She's a little shorter and a little heavier than Poodleface, loves people, loves to be petted, and still occasionally ducks when someone raises their arm. I once threw a dog toy over her head (Poodleface was standing behind her) and she ran out of the room. I'm not sure I've ever felt worse. I sometimes call her Soft Sage because when we got her the shelter had given her a ridiculously poofy poodle cut and you could bury your fingers in two inches of fur on her topknot without ever touching the dog.
I suppose I'll have to blog about that trip later.
Anyway, I'd already been to Texas once, and I'd already had uncomfortable encounters with people with thick accents who hadn't heard of service dogs. But the one I had on this trip was worse, for several reasons.

• It was dark out.
• No other employee with an accent I could understand overheard and rushed over to sort things out.
• My father walked in.

It was dark outside and bright inside and the gas station had large windows, which was probably pleasant during the day but at night felt very vulnerable. I went in to buy some chips while my father was putting gas in the camper.

The man behind the counter immediately stopped me and told me that I couldn't have a dog inside. I said it was a service dog, which 90% of the time makes people immediately step back and leave me alone. He shook his head and said something quickly I couldn't understand with his accent. 

I gave my little speech on how service dogs were protected by federal law. He had his arms crossed and was still shaking his head at me, occasionally talking over me to say that I should leave. I got Poodleface's license out of his vest and showed it to him. I said that Poodleface was the same as a seeing-eye dog and that, really, he couldn't throw me out. He still said no, and something about his bosses rule that I didn't really get because, again, he was talking too fast in an accent I couldn't understand. I put the license back in the jacket and got out one of my ridiculously friendly cards, folded over once and with happy rounded edges, which boldly proclaim "I'm a service dog!" and go on to list all the rules and regulations. I held it out to him. He shook his head and refused to take it. I stood there, with my back to these huge dark windows, feeling small and alone and waving this card and wondering if, maybe, I should just give up. I felt like I was in the wrong here, and I felt powerless, and he was taller than me and I couldn't understand him. 

I heard the door open behind me, and then my father was standing over my shoulder, repeating what I'd said to the man who was still shaking his head. I stood in the background and felt horrible and embarrassed while they talked, and when the man finally threw up his hands and said okay and walked away from the counter to the other end of the store, I decided that I didn't really want any chips and ran like hell back to the camper. I was so ashamed that my father had had to step in like that.

That was really horrible.

I think I'll stay out of Texas from now on.

Snow in Texas

Because it was so late in the year we decided that our vacation destination should be somewhere around New Mexico. We were traveling by camper and figured that, because of the warmer climate, the campgrounds there would probably still be open late in October. I didn't bring my laptop and was only occasionally able to get online, but when I did I checked the weather back home, expecting to be able to gloat about how much better the weather was in whatever state I happened to be in at the moment.

The temperature at home stayed around sixty the whole time we were gone.

And when we got to Texas it snowed.

In the camper I sleep on a shelf above the cab. It has a window and a light and a curtain, but there're only about two feet of room between the ceiling and the floor, so it's basically a glorified shelf. There isn't room it sit up, so I do literally roll out of bed in the mornings, and the space is nearly impossible to heat in the winter or cool in the summer. So when it snowed on us in Texas, I elected to trade in the privacy of having a curtain for a lack of frostbite and sleep on the couch.

Poodleface has always slept by himself. At home he has a kennel he gets into at bedtime or whenever we're in my room and he thinks I'm being boring. When visiting relatives or staying in hotels he sleeps in a collapsible kennel, slightly smaller than his one at home and resembling a rectangular tent. In the camper he sleeps on the sofa. So, for the first time in almost four years, I slept with my dog.

It went better than expected. We kicked each other for the first few minutes until we'd both found a comfortable position, and then we slept until morning. I woke up with warm feet and no frostbite, and I lifted the curtain to see a beautiful winter wonderland with snow hanging heavily off the trees and sparkling on the ground, which was really quite beautiful until I remembered we were in Texas. Then it was just weird.

I expand my scientific horizons, Poodleface gets stalked by a tourist

We went to a science museum while on vacation, which I initially thought was going to be a disaster but which turned out alright in the end.
My father and I bought tickets to see a show in the planetarium on the history of spaceflight, and we had a half-hour to kill in the rest of the museum before the show started. The front hall was under construction and very loud, so we escaped to a wing filled with model planets and interactive solar system displays, and I was sitting at one with Poodleface on the floor beside me when he suddenly started to growl. I turned around and shushed him and found myself face-to-face with a very embarrassed-looking woman who was, I thought, ridiculously hunched over. She straightened up and hurried away, and my dad, who had seen the whole thing, explained that she had been very slowly and deliberately creeping up on Poodleface, which he had noticed and felt threatened by since she was acting more like an incompetent predator than one of the normal curious humans he was used to dealing with.
Honestly, you can just come over and talk to me. I won't get offended. You don't need to stalk my dog.
I was feeling really embarrassed and defensive and worried that we would get thrown out because my dog had growled, but nothing happened and we got to see the show in the planetarium. And they had handicapped seating! Some theaters don't, and in those I put Poodleface on my lap and suffer through the show with fifty-two pounds of disgruntled poodle curled up on my legs, which is why I absolutely love it when I get a special seat with lots of room around it and he can just stretch out on the floor.
The show was projected onto the curved ceiling overhead, and the animation was done so that it changed perspective with each shot and made the audience feel like we were hurtling through space. Poodleface watched very intently, occasionally tilting his head or glancing at me to show just how much he didn't understand, but he was polite and well-behaved and very adorable.
After the show we looked at the dinosaur bones and walked through a mock cave and the glowing inside of a plaster volcano, and while we were in the ocean life wing and I was admiring a tank of manta rays (Poodleface didn't understand what they were and has his head sideways again) a woman came bounding over, squealed at Poodleface and held out her arms as though she wanted to hug him, then told me very seriously that I didn't have to worry; she knew all about service dogs and understood that they couldn't be petted or talked to. I wondered aloud to my dad if she thought knowing the rules made her above them when we weren't quite out of earshot, which felt good in the heat of the moment but was really pretty mean of me. Sorry about that.
We went out through the gift shop, where I discovered that astronaut ice cream is manufactured on equipment that also processes peanuts (It takes some of the novelty out of a thing when you realize it's made in a factory and not some top-secret NASA supply room, so I wasn't all that disappointed) and where my dad bought a tube with a spring in it that sounds like an alien ray gun every time it's jostled. Poodleface once again didn't understand, and this time he was a little afraid and stood behind my legs. He warmed up to the tube on the walk back to the camper, which sounded like we were being shot at every step of the way. Fortunately, no one was wearing red.

Woohoo!!!

I DID IT! I GOT MY GED! I'M A GRADUATE!!!!
...which has absolutely nothing to do with service dogs or peanut allergies, but I mentioned a few posts back that I was trying to get it, and now I have. Yay!

Well....shit.

I had a nice long post partway typed out about the vacation we just came back from, but my computer stalled and froze and had to be restarted and I lost the whole thing. Sooooo, I'll come back to that later and for now I'm gonna talk about sunglasses.

We went to New Mexico and Texas in our camper last week and I spent a lot of time thinking longingly of sunglasses and how much I miss being able to wear them. I'd love to, but I don't, because they're just not worth the misunderstandings.
I got Poodleface at the beginning of summer, so I learned fairly quickly that if you wear sunglasses whilst walking a service dog everyone will assume that you're blind. A lot of people will approach you and ask if they're right, are you blind? And then you get to explain that you're not, no, it's just very bright outside, and then the conversation can go one of two ways. They can be embarrassed but handle it well, or they can demand to know if you really need a service dog at all or if you were just hoping you could wear the sunglasses and have no one notice the clearly unworthy dog you've just brought into their store.
So I swore off sunglasses forever.

Aaaand off we go!

I'm about to leave on another family vacation, so there won't be any new posts for a while. Poodleface says thanks for your patience.

Can I please explain to you that I am not your cousin?

I really, really hated my high school Geography class. We had to take notes in the dark because the teacher insisted on projecting pictures, we had to make power point presentations and then waste two days listening to our classmates stumble through them, we had to memorize the names of small rivers and then regurgitate them on quizzes, and I sat near a girl who clearly knew more about my allergy than I did.
You see, she had a cousin. And her cousin was allergic to peanuts. But her cousin never mentioned it, and she ate at restaurants, and she didn't carry an EpiPen, and she certainly didn't have a service dog, and so, really, what was wrong with me that I had to be such an attention whore about the whole thing?
We had this conversation about once a week. She told me condescendingly that her cousin got along fine without a service dog, I pointed out that some allergies are more severe than others, and then she either called me a bitch or said I was a liar, depending on the tone of that week's conversation. Logical reasoning did not get rid of her. Providing accurate information and citing my sources did not get rid of her. Refusing to speak or make eye contact or acknowledge her presence did not get rid of her. Fighting fire with fire did not get rid of her. And asking to have my desk moved did not work.
I felt like this girl was trying to persuade me that I didn't need to use little paper wrappers to bake cupcakes because she baked cookies last week and didn't need them, and still insisted that I didn't need them even when I explained how a cupcake is different from a cookie and not all desserts are exactly alike. And she was angry about it. Why was I using paper wrappers? What did I think I was doing? That was wrong, wrong, wrong! Did I want to kill trees?

Hazards of a service dog: running errands with a walking disaster

As much time as I spend with Poodleface, sometimes it's just impossible to keep him from ruining himself. And then I have to go out in public with him. 

• One of my first poodle disasters was when there wasn't enough time to finish his haircut and I had to take him to school with some patches of fur longer than others.
• When I had strep two years ago and was too tired to pay attention to him he stole a tube of grape lip balm off my desk and ate it, turning his face and front paws a shade of purple that wouldn't wash out.
• In an art class I took in high school he lay down on a plate of black paint and spent two weeks looking part dalmatian.
• I was writing myself a note on my hand during class while we watched a movie in the dark. A desk tipped over, Poodleface barked in surprise, and I dyed his muzzle blue when I covered his mouth before the ink had dried. 

Funny story: I'm not really an animal abuser

There used to be a rumor at the high school that I was an animal abuser and that whenever I was alone with Poodleface I beat him. Although we communicate really well, I think there are always going to be times we don't understand each other and make some sort of mistake. While we were attending school I tripped over him once and stepped on his paw twice, and there were several times where he stepped on my foot or walked into my legs. Whenever one of those things happened everyone nearby would start shouting that I was an animal abuser. It was really very annoying; I doubt there's anyone in the world who hasn't tripped on their dog at some point.
I had the flu a few months before I left high school and on my first day back I needed to talk to my science teacher about the test I'd missed. He gave us the period to work, so I decided not to wait until after class and told Poodleface to stay beside my desk while I went up to speak with the teacher. It was something I'd done lots of times; rousing a sleeping poodle and having him walk with me just to ask a question or hand in a work sheet isn't practical, and as long as he can see me he's perfectly willing to stay.
I'd barely said two words to the teacher before I heard nails skittering on linoleum and Poodleface came hurrying up the aisle to me. He looked frightened of something, and as I picked up the leash to reassure him a boy who sits near me started stammering that he'd thought Poodleface wanted to be petted.
He'd thought, he told me as I put my dog back under my desk, that the only reason I wouldn't let anyone pet Poodleface was to me mean to him, so as soon as I left him alone he tried to comfort him because he was probably really sad if I was abusing him and he could use all the love he could get. But Poodleface freaked out because he knows I'm the only one who ever touches him in school and he could clearly see that I was nowhere near him, and when he jumped the boy tried to grab him, and it became embarrassingly clear that I wasn't an animal abuser when Poodleface ran to me for reassurance.
Not that it did anything to stop the rumor, but it's a good lesson in why service dogs shouldn't be petted. Even if you really want to.

Did you read the dead bird?

I'm a vegetarian. Not because of any meat-is-murder train of thought, because my mother is a vegetarian and I was raised on a vegetarian diet. When I was about eight my parents asked me if I wanted to try meat, but we had a hard time finding a restaurant that didn't cook their meat in or close to peanut oil, and when I finally got some it wasn't earth-shatteringly wonderful. I ate hot dogs for a while, but after finding an unidentifiable and very chewy thing in the middle of one I was more than ready to go back to salad. There's usually a small packet of ham in the fridge that my father puts in his omlettes, but apart from that the house is pretty meat-free.
My father went to the store last night after we realized that we'd run out of food without anyone noticing. When he came back I started putting the food away and discovered some fried chicken, which raised a lot of alarm bells because the bag said it was from Wal*Mart and we'd discovered when I was eleven that I couldn't eat chicken from Wal*Mart. Since it had been six years I thought that something might have changed, but I was still cautious enough that I went outside in the dark in my pajamas to where my father was continuing to unload the car, where I asked him if he had "read the dead bird," which is wary vegetarian teenager speak for "did you check to make sure it's safe for me to be in the same room with the chicken?"
He said he had read the dead bird, but when I got more specific and asked if he'd read the dead bird display he realized that he hadn't. Six years ago the chicken itself had been fine, while the display had warned that everything on it had been made next to stuff that was made in peanut oil.
Although I'm usually the one who searches with him, Poodleface was already sniffing around the chicken when my dad got back to the kitchen, so he asked him if there was anything there and he happily indicated. Which impressed my dad, since he normally doesn't give Poodleface the time of day. And yet the dog was willing to search for him.
I came in shortly after that and asked Poodleface to confirm what he'd told my dad, which he did very emphatically, slapping his paw against the bag when my dad asked him if he was sure. "It's here, right here, I've only told you three times!"  Then he got his reward and the chicken was removed from the house.
Have I mentioned that I love that dog?

Let's muse on my troubled past

My school system has a very high suicide rate, but it also has a high rate of students who go on to higher education. What's up with that?
My friend thinks that it's because they systematically exclude, bully, and harass everyone who doesn't fit their idea of a perfect student until they either drop out or kill themselves. I wasn't sure whether or not I believed her hypothesis until I went in to take part of my GED and found myself face-to-face with seven people, six of whom I recognized as having mysteriously vanished from school months or years previously. And I didn't just remember them from across the cafeteria, these were people who I'd seen being screamed at in the halls by teachers while I tried to look away and not stare because I'd been there and I knew how horrible it was when people stared. People who no longer wanted to speak in class, like me, and who tried not to look a teacher in the face, like me. I think I was probably the only one who routinely received death threats, but that's probably to be expected when you've got such a prominent Achilles heel.

I think my friend might be right, and I kind of hope she is. Because I've read other blogs and it looks like I'm unique in the sheer volume of shit I had to tolerate over my malfunctioning immune system. And I've read news articles where they arrested kids for doing once what my classmates did on a daily basis. And if that's the reality then I must have either deserved what happened because no one wanted to stop it, or no one wanted to stop it because these aren't nice people and it's in no way my fault.
Although the fact that I had no less than five teachers who blatantly waved peanuts around just to see what I would do makes me lean towards the "it's not my fault" line of reasoning.

Part of me is male with four legs, apparently

Before I got one myself, I thought of a service dog as something like a wheelchair or an artificial arm. After I got one I re-evaluated my analogy and decided that they're more like exceedingly well-behaved children who think squirrels are really interesting. I also found out that, legally, they're the same as pacemakers or insulin pumps. From the perspective of a lawyer, Poodleface is an extension of my own body, which is how they justify that I'm allowed to take him everywhere. Not because he's a very special dog, but because he's me. Only furrier. And the wrong gender.
I found that policy a bit oddly worded until I read The Golden Compass and realized that I've technically got a daemon.

Do I really take that long?

We'd stopped at a gas station in the middle of a long drive home from a day trip out of town, and I was looking forward to getting something cold to drink to combat the summer heat. I took Poodleface over to use the grass before we went inside. The man behind the counter immediately told me to take my dog back outside. "It's a service dog," I told him, pointing to the jacket. He crossed his arms and glared. "We only allow seeing eye dogs."

"Service dogs are allowed everywhere. It's federal law. I have his ID card if you want to see it," I offered in the bland tone I usually adopt when arguing service dog policy. He shook his head sternly at me, but didn't object when Poodleface and I headed for the neon RESTROOMS sign. 

I'd seen an ice cream cooler by the window and was envisioning myself eating a popsicle, but when I looked they didn't have any of the brands I usually buy. I took one out and started reading the ingredients list.

"Look." said the man, sounding very annoyed, "Is there something I can help you find?"

I looked up from the list. "I have severe food allergies," I told him, "I have to read this."

"Oh, do you?"

I chose not to answer that and went back to the list. It checked out okay, so I put it on the counter and reached for my money while I waited for him to ring it up. He didn't, opting to hold it hostage while he interrogated me a little more.

"What kind of service does that dog do?"

"Medical alert."

"Which means what?"

I gave the popsicle a pointed look. He scanned it, accepted my money, but withheld the change. I took a deep breath.

"A medical alert dog accompanies a person with a hidden disability and alerts them if they're going to have an attack or need medical treatment. Seizure dogs are medical alert dogs."

He studied me for a few seconds. "Do you have seizures?"

I don't even tell people who aren't rude insensitive gits why I have Poodleface because so many of them decide I've found a clever loophole and exploited it to get a pet with a VIP pass, so I simply held out my hand for my change, which I got ten seconds later when he realized he couldn't make me say anything else. 

I went back out to the car with my popsicle, thinking about what a jerk he was and how I hate people like him, when I realized that maybe I had been taking a little too long to read the popsicle. How long do normal people take, anyway?

I do that while I'm shopping too, although for things I buy every time I just flip them over and briefly scan the list, not really taking the time to study it in-depth. Do I annoy other shoppers? Does it look strange? I'd never realized anyone might consider it abnormal.

What do you think? Do you ever read things before you buy them?

I'm not eating that

When I was seven I spent most of my summer at a day camp or with a babysitter. The babysitter I liked; she never tried to give me a snack that my parents hadn't already said was safe and she brought my EpiPen along if we were going to walk to a park or something. But the adults at the day camp I had a problem with.
In the summer program we got two snacks a day in addition to the lunch boxes our parents packed us. I'd take the cup of juice that came with it, but I'd always refuse the snack. It wasn't until fourth grade that I was able to consistently and accurately sound out and define everything in an ingredients list, and so I just didn't take one. Until one day, when the snack was apples. I took one, ate it, and came back with the core a few minutes later and asked for seconds. I got it, but the adults sat me down and asked why I was so hungry today when I'd never wanted a snack before. I explained that I had peanut allergies and didn't know how to read an ingredients list, but that apples don't have ingredients lists, so today I got to have a snack. Then I went off to wash the apple juice off my hands, and the adults apparently stayed behind and decided that my refusal to eat snacks was only paranoia and obviously very unhealthy if I'd been hungry enough to eat two apples. (Or maybe I just liked apples. That was always a possibility, but none of them considered it.) So the next day at snack time they took me aside, presented me with a cup of juice and a packet of teddy bear grahams, and told me that I was going to sit at the table until I'd eaten all of them. I drank all the juice, picked up the packet, turned it over a few times, and decided that I had no idea what the list said and so I wasn't going to eat it. Then I sat at the table for almost an hour, rolling the cup around, playing with my hair, crying a little, and whining about how I had to use the bathroom. They eventually let me up to use the bathroom with the understanding that I would come right back when I was done, and then I ran away and hid in various play rooms until five when my mother came to get me. For the rest of the year they harassed me about eating snacks, but I ran away when the subject came up and either staged a hunger strike or threw a tantrum when cornered, and they never succeeded in making me eat anything. They never told my mother they were doing this and it didn't occur to me that I should, so I don't think she even found out until years later when we were talking about the place I used to go.

Great. Now what do I do?

There was a plane crash when I was in junior high. Some kids died. It's a small community; we all knew them. At least one of them. At least in passing.
I knew this boy, but not really by name. I recognized his picture. He went to this summer program with me, a day camp to keep us out of our parent's hair. Every year there were fewer and fewer of us there, depending on when their parents through they were mature enough to stay home alone. I went there when I was ten and everything was fine. There were about fifteen of us. We had free run of the place, and for the most part we didn't abuse the privilege. I carried my EpiPen (I only had one then, and it had a friendly green cap. The dosage changed as I got older and now I've got two of them and they're an ugly yellow) in a soft black camera case tossed carelessly over my shoulder because I didn't know yet that I should care enough to buy a purse, and nobody really noticed. I wandered off when someone had a snack with peanuts. That was it.
I went there when I was eleven and it didn't even take an hour for everyone to hate me. I'd never been allergy bullied before, or beaten up in a ball pit, but there's a first time for everything, I guess.
There was a boy who waved a crust in the air and said that it came from a peanut butter sandwich, and I crossed my arms and said that it wasn't funny, and he tossed it into the trash and gave me a quick apology and left the room. He didn't try to help me, but he didn't do it again, either. He just kind of stayed away while I learned that I shouldn't use a camera case; it doesn't matter if your EpiPen is undamaged if it's been stolen and hung from a pipe. Honestly, girl. What were you thinking? You use a purse.
I withdrew a month early. Last year I'd made friends by taking off my shoes and shimmying up a light pole. It nearly gave the woman watching us a heart attack, but I knew I wouldn't fall. This year I'd made enemies by existing. I wasn't sure what I'd done, I'm still not, but I irritated a lot of people. Last year the adults said I was cute. This year they told me not to be so sensitive.
And then I went back to school, and I got a purse with multicolored stripes and a pocket that I carried a book in, and I was annoyed but not surprised when I was bullied some more, and I learned that the boy with the crust was dead in a plane crash.
What do you do with that kind of information?
He'd tried bullying me, but he'd stopped, and we'd called a truce of sorts. He certainly wasn't my friend. I didn't know if I hated him. Now he was dead. Now what?
I cried. And I think if the death threat girl died I would cry for her too.
What does that make me?

Moon dust and wet wipes

I've been trying to think of a metaphor to describe what was happening at school, and I think I've finally found one.
Space travel.
I saw a NOVA once about how a chunk of foam damaged a spacecraft. It was part of the thing, a kind of insulation if I remember correctly, and during liftoff it tore free and bounced off of something and severely damaged it, and everyone laughed at the poor scientist who finally figured out what had happened. He proved mathematically that he was probably right, but they still didn't believe that it was possible. He had to get them all out in an empty field and shoot a piece of the foam at a section of the outside of a spacecraft at the speed that it would have been traveling during the liftoff, and only when it punched a hole clean through the thing did his colleagues admit that they may have been a bit close-minded. Because, seriously, it was only foam!
I feel like that. Only I'm not willing to go into anaphylactic shock in front on an audience to prove that I'm not crazy.
How many of you have thought about living on the moon? Probably all of us, myself included. It's the kind of thing the media loves to talk about. But do you know what could screw that up?
Moon dust. It gets into everything. There are records of it clogging equipment during moon landings. And if you stir it up, it floats. And floats. And floats. And gets into bits of your space suit you'd really prefer remained dust free. But how many of you knew about that before I told you? How many of you would have considered that something as small as dust could be potentially deadly? How could dust harm anything? We never saw that on Star Trek!
And, seriously, could traces of peanut oil ever really hurt anyone? No one told us that could happen! People with food allergies are twitchy nerds with poor social skills, everyone knows that! You can't take them seriously when they tell you they could die!
There are simple solutions to both problems. Spacecrafts need to be designed with no loose parts, and we need to seal up equipment so moon dust can't get in.
I just need to avoid peanuts! I just need to be allowed to read ingredients lists and run a wet wipe over things before I touch them! It's not that hard!
But no one wants to believe the problem exists. It's too weird. It gets in the way. It spoils our idea of how things should work.
But refusing to believe in something doesn't make it go away. Scientists eventually had to admit that moon dust and insulation could potentially be very dangerous. I'd like to think that, one day, some of my teachers will realize they could have seriously hurt me.
But I'm not holding my breath.

What would it take to make a scaredy-cat play with fire?

In one of my previous posts I talked about how my allergist assumed that I was no longer allergic to peanuts because I hadn't been to the emergency room in the past year. I hadn't planned on talking about him any further, but today I found an appointment reminder postcard from him in my mailbox and now I'm angry enough to elaborate on his story.

As I said before, he was insistent that I, personally, didn't need a service dog, nor did anyone else with a severe allergy. He explained to my family why he thought it was a bad idea and said that we should instead consider prescription medication to suppress my immune system. My father declined the medication and insisted that he give me the test, as they had planned over the phone. He did have me tested but kept insisting that I must not be severely allergic anymore because I hadn't nearly died recently.

The tests showed that I was still severely allergic and perhaps I hadn't nearly died recently because I was a responsible young adult who knew how to manage my allergy. 

My parents sent in the paperwork for the service dog and everything was approved. Now we just had to get permission from the school district for me to bring the dog to school.

The reason my parents thought I needed a dog was that I kept getting sick in class. I would being to cough and would get painful rashes, usually on the palms of my hands or the undersides of my arms, which indicated that I'd sat at a contaminated desk or touched a contaminated hand rail. The reactions that I was having were usually very painful, and with each new reaction there was a risk that my allergy could become much more severe. It was already at the point were it could kill me, and my parents didn't want it to become bad enough that I could die before medical help could arrive. 

About three weeks after I'd seen the allergist I started to have problems in one of my classes. After a few minutes of class my hands would begin to feel hot and itchy and I would being to cough. On one day I wore short sleeves and the reaction covered my entire right arm. After a few minutes of coughing I would either ask to leave or the teacher would order me to step outside until I could get control of myself, and then I would go down to the office and get some Benadryl from the nurse and ask that someone please clean my desk. This happened three days in a row. On the third day my assigned guidance counselor approached me as I was sitting outside the nurse's office waiting for the period to end. She sat down next to me and asked me, with great concern in her voice, why I was skipping this class. I told her that I wasn't skipping, I really was having an allergic reaction. She said, still sounding very concerned, that she knew it wasn't possible for me to have an allergic reaction unless I ate something and that I could tell her what was bothering me. I tried to explain that some allergies are more severe than others, but she left before I could finish.

She went back to her office and made several phone calls, one of which was to my allergist, whose number I assume she got from my file. She told him that, hypothetically, there was a student who was claiming to have an allergic reaction to peanuts when there were no peanuts present in the room, and that she hadn't recently eaten anything that might have been causing it. And she wondered, hypothetically, if this was possible. My allergist told her that, hypothetically, the student was lying. 

Being the kind, caring, and exceedingly nosy person that she is, my counselor decided that she should save my academic future by putting a stop to my lying. 

There were already a lot of people who didn't believe me, so many that I was honestly surprised when the teacher was the one who asked me to leave. Usually I'm told that I have to stay, and then they would watch me closely to see if they could find a flaw in my acting, and I'd either have to get up and leave without their permission or bother them enough that they let me leave so that my parents wouldn't complain to the school. So the fact that my counselor had gotten a medical professional to say that, hypothetically, I was a liar, wasn't great for the case that I should be allowed to have a service dog.

That night my father spent hours at the computer, surfing the internet and printing a stack of papers as thick as a paperback book. They all talked about severe food allergies, and they all supported what I'd said. He took it to the principal, explained what was happening with me, and then made the case for the service dog. The principal agreed.

But it really screwed me up. I already wasn't sure I deserved a service dog. The junior high had let people give me death threats and acted like I was off my nut when I tried to get them to help me. My allergist had insisted a service dog was unnecessary. And half the adults in my life got angry or exasperated or began patting me on the head when I mentioned my allergies. Was I really allergic? Was I lying so well I'd convinced myself? What could I have done wrong to make so many people angry with me? 

My father cut my old allergist out of the loop. The next time we needed a doctor's note he got it from the pediatrician, and he found a new allergist out of state that I'll go to the next time I need an allergy test. So today, when I got the appointment card from that close-minded old fart, and I realized that he still considers me his patient and thinks he can have a say in my life, I took it outside and burned it. 

If you do this, I hate you

I can't stand people who make their children's happiness my responsibility. When this happens I usually just get a nasty look after I've told their little angel that they can't pet my dog, but there was one mother whom I met last May who was rude enough that I've decided to post about her.
Poodleface and I were walking through what passes for downtown in a place as small as this. We were on our way to the bookstore and were almost there when a mother down the street started excitedly telling her daughter to look at the dog. I feel a little strange whenever parents do that, but whatever. It's no big deal.
I went into the bookstore and started reading the back cover of a book on the front table, but before I'd read more than the first sentence the door opened and the mother came through leading her daughter by the hand and talking happily to her about going to see the dog. I shook my head at her and moved farther down the table, but she still came over to me and asked me brightly if her daughter could pet my dog. "No," I said, a bit weirded out that she'd followed me into the store. She stared at me like I'd done something shocking, and I put the book down and headed for the back of the store because I really hate having to justify the no petting rule to sulking mothers.
I noticed a book on the bottom shelf that looked interesting so I sat on the floor and started looking through it.  I'd been there a few minutes when I heard someone clear their throat above me and I looked up to see that the same mother had once again followed me, and she did not look happy. I started to stand up but she held up her hands and told me to stop; she didn't want me to run away again. I'd actually just wanted to be on the same level as her, but whatever. I stayed on the ground and waited as she told me how I'd made her daughter cry with my rudeness and how disappointed she was that I wasn't even willing to speak to a small child.
I waited until she was done, then got to my feet and told her that I wasn't very happy either; I didn't like being treated like a museum exhibit and if I didn't want to talk to her daughter I didn't have to.
She looked at me like she couldn't believe there were people like me in the world, then said huffily, "Well, I guess we both learned something today. And now my daughter knows not to touch strange dogs." She stormed off and I stood there wishing I wasn't a teenager so she might have taken me a little more seriously.

What's wrong with me? I mean, besides the whole peanut thing...

I really hated myself for a while.
Whenever I mentioned my allergies at school people would groan and roll their eyes and ask me if I could please just drop it, just stop, why did I keep doing this? Whenever I got up and left a classroom the teacher would ask me if it was really necessary and the whole class would start whispering about me. Not to mention the death threats and the teasing and the way people liked to shout "PEANUT!" as I passed in the hallway.
There was this one day, about three weeks before I left school, that made me so mad I literally did see red. Poodleface and I were going to lunch along with a third of the school. Everyone, myself included, was wearing a really heavy backpack because the school issued us laptops, and backpacks to go with those laptops, and we were required to use them so that the laptops would stay protected. But the bottom of the bag was reinforced and wouldn't bend and was too big to fit in a locker, so we had to carry them everywhere for the whole day. There was also a rule that said that we couldn't take them into the cafeteria, so we tossed them in a pile at the door, which pissed the teachers off but it wasn't like we had a choice. At the beginning of the year someone had figured out that if you grabbed the handle of someone's backpack and gave it a light tug it would overbalance them and they would fall over. When I first felt my center of gravity shift dramatically backwards that's what I thought was happening, but the boy who'd yanked my bag caught me before I fell. So there I was, in his arms, unable to see who it was because he was behind me, wondering what the hell he was doing and why he was holding me so gently. We stood like that for a few seconds, and then he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, "peanut." Then he set me back on my feet and when I turned around he was gone, thus completing the most intimate insult I have ever gotten.
What really pissed me off is that no other boy had ever held me like that. Other girls who share my social standing get sexually harassed, but all anyone ever shouted at me was "peanut." I wasn't even a girl anymore, they hated me so much.
They hated me for being allergic to peanuts, and they acted like I was doing it deliberately and they wished I'd just stop.
So why didn't I stop? Why didn't I just stop it? I wanted to stop, I really did. I wanted to cry and lay  on the ground and say I was sorry, I was really sorry, I hadn't meant to do it, it just happened, I couldn't stop it, I was so, so sorry and I understood that they hated me and wanted to hurt me, I hated myself too.
I left school because my only other alternative was to start harming myself.

There ought to be a manual

If you or someone you know has a food allergy, that's okay. There are about a hundred sites that'll tell you what to do. They'll give you recipes and activities and ideas that'll work for everyone, and they'll explain in detail exactly why all of that is necessary.
If you or someone you know has a service dog, that's a bit problematic. There aren't any rules for that.

Okay, so there are a lot of different kinds of service dog and a lot of different kinds of training and no two dogs are alike, but surely we all have some things in common? Like small children. We should be told how to keep a small child from touching our service dog. Or, there could be a chapter on restaurants. Restaurants are fraught with peril for service dog owners. Table or booth, which has more room for a dog? Do you let your dog eat the food on the floor or does that look unprofessional? Should you wait in an awkward silence while the waitstaff coos over your dog or is it okay to ask them to knock it off and pay attention to their customer? What if someone at a table near you starts complaining about unsanitary dogs? Do you ignore them or defend yourself? And what if there's a hyperactive child?
Or, there could be a list of tactics for diffusing a situation where someone won't let you in because they don't know about service dog laws. That's always a horrible situation and I'd love some tips on how to get through it.
There could be a chapter on traveling! It could give advice about flying with a service dog, and about hotels, and playing tourist. It could help you plan for your dog's needs, like how to get dog food through airport security or keeping your dog calm on a long bus ride.
Seriously, why isn't there a manual? I know I could have used one. For about a month after I got Poodleface I was playing it by ear and desperately trying to remember the few days of instruction I'd had from his trainer. A manual would have been a wonderful lifeline.

I'm dreaming of a white poodle

As previously mentioned, I pretty much live in the middle of nowhere and so have only crossed paths with three other people who have service dogs. One man I passed on the sidewalk. From the design of his dog's harness I guessed that he was blind, and because I was too shy to say anything to him (and, really, what would I say? "Hi there, I've also got a service dog! We should be friends!"?) he probably doesn't know I exist.
The second woman I met outside my friend's apartment when her dog ran up to me and began to bark at Poodleface before I could get inside. She caught the dog and clipped it back onto her leash and told me she was  sorry, her dog is usually a lot better behaved and it's actually a registered seizure alert dog but it knows it's not on duty now. I pointed out Poodleface's jacket and we had about a minute of service dog-related conversation before I had to go up and meet my friend. Since then I've seen her from a distance going into a store my father and I were driving past, but we haven't had another chance to talk.
The third woman I met in the candy aisle of WalGreens, and she and her psychotic dog nearly got Poodleface and I thrown out of the store. I was sitting on the floor, minding my own business and reading the ingredients list of a new kind of candy I wanted to try, when I heard growling. I looked up and saw that Poodleface was shifting from foot to foot, looking uncertain but remaining polite as a brown dog in a bright orange vest growled nastily at him. On the other end of the leash was an older woman in a flowery dress, who strangely didn't seem to care that her dog was opening both of us to possible legal action. The general public doesn't actually like it when service dogs threaten to brawl in aisle five, you see.
I dropped the candy and got to my feet, positioning the leash in my hands so that I was ensured complete control over my dog, although at the moment he wasn't actually doing anything besides shuffling and making uncertain little woofs. I asked the woman if we should maybe go to different aisles, and she smiled at me and said, "They need to learn."
Yeah, that's great, lady, your dog definitely needs to learn, so maybe you should, I dunno, teach it something? She had it on an extendable leash and was letting it have as much slack as it wanted, hadn't positioned her arm so that she would be able to pull against it if it decided to lunge, and it wasn't even wearing any kind of prong or choke collar. Not that a service dog should need one for everyday use, but they're good insurance in case something unexpected happens, like if someone decides they want to lure your dog over with a steak, or if you're face-to-face with a very irresponsible service dog owner who may or may not be about to let her dog attack your dog. Especially if you're a teenage girl and said dog is half your body weight. You can see how they would come in handy.
I started to back away, and the dog picked that moment to lunge. Poodleface started to jump toward it, and I can't really blame him; it was clearly challenging him, but, since he was wearing his prong collar (hint hint) as soon as I started moving backwards he gave up and came with me. We got to the end of the aisle, at which point the manager came hurrying over and told me to take my dog outside. I showed him Poodleface's service dog license and explained that my dog hadn't been the aggressor. He seemed a little upset about that, but he couldn't legally make either of us leave the store, so he just ordered me to stay away from the old lady, which I did, but whenever her dog caught a glimpse of me on the other end of an aisle it would start to growl again. She never seemed bothered by it and just kept smiling, so I left the store as quickly as I could and never got a chance to really talk to her.
In short, I don't know anyone else with a service dog with whom I can sit down and chat. If I thought there were enough people I'd probably try to start a support group, but this town is so small that, given two to three hours and some cool weather, I can actually walk from one end to the other. So I don't have anyone I can talk things over with and I have no idea if my experiences are common or unique, but I'm curious and I'd like to know. The thing I'd most like to talk about is my dreams.
Poodleface shows up in my dreams.
For almost two years after I got him I'd go to sleep and forget he existed, but one night, when I believe I was dreaming about jogging across a wavering foot bridge that sank abruptly into the water and necessitated me to jump, there he was beside me. A joyous white poodle leaping into the air, connected to me by our familiar leash; exactly six feet of leather that used to be red but has been worn to a supple dark brown by almost constant use.
The next night I was wandering around a beautiful museum that seemed to be part construction zone, and as I was crawling beneath scaffolding and lying on my back on a mosaic marble floor to see the paintings on the domed ceiling, Poodleface was right there beside me. I remember, I even decided to take the stairs rather than climb out a window and down a ladder because I knew he wouldn't be able to follow me.
For the past year he's been in almost all my dreams. He came with me up the stairs of the bus when the police chased and arrested me in the middle of the desert, I threw his leash away so that he wouldn't fall with me when I lost my footing on a narrow bridge, and I took him out into the river in a canoe, and then under the surface of the dark water and into a secret passage to explore with me. I've had dreams where he guided me, dreams where I lost him and panicked, dreams where he could speak and where I could send him on errands. He died once in my dreams, drowning in a swimming pool when I selfishly left him alone, and I cried myself awake and then called him over so I could hug him.
He twitches in his sleep and whimpers and snuffles, and I wonder if I'm in his dreams as often as he's in mine.
I have no idea if anyone else dreams about their service dog, and I'm really curious but have no idea who to ask. It's not like there's a manual for this kind of thing. (Which, come to think of it, there really should be. )
Maybe someone who's reading this could tell me?

How I (metaphorically) singed my nose hair

Poodleface and I went to a Renaissance Festival with my parents earlier this year. It was great; I saw performances and musicians and wonderful costumes, I bought a wooden sword I later accidentally rolled onto in my sleep and a Sky Chair that we'll probably never install, I was referred to as a 'fair maiden' with absolutely no sarcasm, and I successfully escaped the vendor who wanted to sell me a dog kilt, whatever the heck that is.
I also learned what happens when I walk past a stall selling roasted peanuts; Poodleface signals with more enthusiasm than I've ever seen, and I grab my nose and wonder if it's possible my nostrils have managed to spontaneously combust.
One of my many trivia books once told me that most kinds of sneezing powder are just finely ground pepper in a jar. So, since I was eleven and had no idea the kind of power that household pepper wields, I got some out of the spice cabinet and inhaled it. Walking past the peanut vendor was like that, only the burning was more intense and my eyes didn't immediately start to water. I kept walking, sneezed about five times, and felt a lot better. Not to sound like a mad scientist, but it was an interesting experience. Most of my peanut reactions center around my throat or my skin, but I'd just happened to be breathing through my nose this time.
After getting far away from the peanut vendor, I enjoyed the rest of my time at the Renaissance Festival, and I think Poodleface did too. It was a nice vacation. Well, except for the bit where I impaled myself on my own sword.

I'm a very loyal customer, even if you suck.

Poodleface and I went on a road trip with my father last summer. We stopped at a gas station around lunch time and picked up some Ruffles and DOTS, which we ate as we drove. The subject somehow turned to my DOTS, (which come in a yellow box and are a bit like gumdrops without the sugar coating) and I explained that I love them because they're completely peanut free and even print a notice on the package guaranteeing it. Now that's customer service. I went on to explain that I go out of my way to eat foods that do this because I'm so grateful for what they do and am more than happy to help them generate revenue. I ate several more DOTS, then added as an afterthought, "They're actually quite disgusting."
Dad had a good laugh about that.

Literary allergic alliteration attempt

I love to read. Since I want to be a writer someday, I can call this both a hobby and a career planning exercise. Which is why it really sucks that I'm allergic to libraries.
I have strange allergic reactions to library books. I once had a rash all the way up both arms before I'd even finished the first chapter. Another time, I didn't feel anything, but I started crying. It went way past watery eyes- I looked like I was crying my heart out. Some books make me cough, some books make me sneeze, some books make my hands hurt, and some books do nothing at all and I'm fine with handling them.
Most of the time it's not peanuts, it's smoke or mold or old paper or the perfume of the person who last read them. It doesn't have anything to do with Poodleface or with peanuts, but it really annoys me and I felt like mentioning it. I'm allergic to libraries.

Sorry, you're not allowed to die for your country

I support our troops, but I'd never thought about joining them. I'd always been small and thin and not very strong, until I had a massive growth spurt a few years ago, and now I'm tall and thin and not very strong. Enlisting just didn't seem like something I could do, or that I wanted to do.
Until I was told that I couldn't. Then I spent several days seriously considering enlisting anyway just to fuck with everybody.
See, my school has this torturous thing called "Post-high planning day" where we were all required to mill around the gym for forty-five minutes while people with brochures gave us free pens and tried to convince us that their college was best.
I already knew where I wanted to go to college. I'd decided three years ago, but I was still required to do things like this. I was also required to take career aptitude and personality match-up tests twice a year every year even though I'd been saying I wanted to be a writer since sixth grade, because God forbid we not have our entire lives planned out by the time we graduate.
Anyway, I really didn't care, so I found some of my friends and trailed along behind them, half-listening to canned speeches on various colleges and collecting a lot of free pens. Until we got to the table advertising military service, where the representative mistakenly assumed I cared and asked me why I had a service dog. When I told him, he said I couldn't enlist. How could they ensure my meals would be safe? How could they get me medical attention if they weren't? How much use was I if I dropped dead in the barracks instead of out on the battlefield where I might at least be able to trip someone?
I don't like being told I can't do things. I don't think anyone does. So even though I understand perfectly the logic behind it, it still really pisses me off. And even though I, personally, never wanted to enlist in the first place, there's probably someone like me out there who did.
What I'm really angry about is that I can't even say it's discrimination because it fucking makes sense. I've got to admit, I'm a very complicated person to accommodate.

Lovely, Poodleface :/

I was sitting in a cramped waiting room the other day, waiting to take the first part of the GED test along with seven other people who I didn't know. Sensing how tense we all were, Poodleface was on his best behavior. He searched my chair, sat where I indicated, and, still polite and with absolutely no change in expression, ripped an impressively squeaky fart.
The situation could have become paralyzingly awkward, but it actually did just the opposite. The laughter broke the ice and we were able to relax and start talking before we were called in to test. It reminded me of another reason I'd left school, (yes, another one) that a dog fart in high school was a good excuse to toss insults at the handler.
Seriously, if you have or are going to get a service dog, never go near a teenage boy. Just don't.

Poodleface once threw up in English. I'm not sure what happened, since up until then I'd only ever seen him throw up after an all-day car ride or after he tried to swallow a treat without chewing it. But it happened, and the teacher didn't want to call the janitor. She acted like I'd said something horrible when I asked her to, like I was trying to force my responsibilities onto someone else. She told me to get some paper towels from the bathroom and clean it up myself, but anyone who's ever had a dog knows that you can't get dog vomit out of carpet using only a paper towel. There's a stain there to this day, which there probably wouldn't be if she'd contacted the man the school pays to clean instead of making a sixteen-year-old do it herself like it was some kind of punishment.

Poodleface was once accused of sexual harassment. And no, he didn't climb onto anyone's leg. One day in math class he decided that he was tired of lying on his side and wanted to lie on his back, so he rolled over. And then the girl sitting in front of me began screaming that he was flashing her.
Poodleface is a dog. He walks around wearing nothing but a collar and a vest. The entire world can, at any time, see his boy parts, but it doesn't matter, because he's a dog. According to this girl's logic the squirrel outside my window needs to be arrested for indecent exposure.

Poodleface was once framed for a crime. There's a boy in my town who I do not get along with. At all. Our feud goes back to seventh grade. I'll refer to him in this post as "Hewitt."
Hewitt, budding psychopath that he is, one day had the brilliant idea that he could probably get me in a lot of trouble if he convinced everyone that Poodleface had taken a dump somewhere in the school. So he procured some dog crap and planted it in the Junior-Senior lounge, and then he made a big deal about pointing to it and exclaiming about it and apparently got impatient after a few minutes of this and started wondering just where the hell Chuck's forever girl was and why she wasn't tearfully denying everything to a stern-faced teacher. So Hewitt, incompetent budding psychopath that he is, went looking for me and found me eating lunch in the general cafeteria, which I always do, never having set foot in the Junior-Senior lounge all year, which he would have known if he'd done some reconnaissance first. Our conversation went like this:
Hewitt: "Hey, ChuckForeverGirl. You're in trouble."
Me: "What? Oh, it's you. Get lost."
Hewitt: "Chuck shit in the lounge! You're going to get suspended."
Me: "Chuck? He's under the table. What are you talking about?"
Hewitt: "There's dog shit in the lounge. Guess you should have cleaned up after him!"
Me: "I haven't been in the lounge all day!"
Hewitt: "There's dog shit! I'll show you, come on!"
Me: "What? What did you do to the door? Is something going to fall on me?"
Hewitt: "Nothing's going to fall on you! Come on, I swear there's really dog shit!"
Just a note to all you budding psychopaths out there; it's probably a good idea to let the authorities confront your intended victim. Doing it yourself pretty much gives the whole thing away.
Hewitt: "See? See the dog shit?"
Me: "Oh, come on! That's from a freaking chihuahua!"
Then I went to the principal and sent Hewitt up the river.

Poodleface occasionally farted, followed immediately by that gleeful "Oooh!" sound that adolescent males make when they've found something new to be vulgar about.

Poodleface sometimes needed to go outside and use the grass after lunch, and the school bullies quickly learned that it's really, really fun to insult someone while they're down on the ground bagging up dog shit.

Poodleface sometimes licked his unmentionables during class. It's great that he's responsible about his personal hygiene, but I really wish he wouldn't do it in public.

Where was I again?

Ever since I got Poodleface the world has had a tendency to get too complicated very, very quickly.
Let me explain: when you're in the middle of a large group of people, for example, you have a lot of things to worry about. Namely the location of your elbows and feet to ensure that you don't step on anyone. If you're like me, you're probably also trying not to brush against anyone or to let them brush against you, and you may or may not be attempting to navigate with a large purse, depending on where you keep your EpiPens. It's a lot to think about. Now, imagine yourself in the same situation, only you're steering a dog. You and the dog are walking close together because of the crowds, and occasionally you'll need to take a rather awkwardly-placed step to avoid treading on the dog. You'll also need to keep watch for any small children (or adults) who want to touch the dog, while still navigating the crowd, trying not to be touched and not to hit anyone with your purse.
Someone you know from school comes up to you and wants to talk. You're discussing the new headband you're wearing when you see, out of the corner of your eye, an unattended child running gleefully toward your dog. In your world, your friend no longer exists. You need to deal with the child, and if your friend is saying anything to you you're not hearing it. There are too many variables, too many balls in the air, and you've chosen to drop everything that doesn't matter and pick it up again later.
I'd seen the same thing happen to mothers with several children to wrangle, but I'd never realized it would happen to me. I didn't realize a lot of things.

Like that Poodleface talks in his sleep. It's night, I'm typing this in bed, and this is the third time I've talked him awake after he started whimpering. I really hope he catches that squirrel.

So please don't judge me?

Starting this blog wasn't easy. I'm so used to being told my allergy doesn't exist, I'm a liar, I'm paranoid, I just want attention....I could go on. So I'm typing everything under the hopeful assumption that none of you are going to come after me with proverbial pitchforks because of the things I'm saying.
I probably shouldn't be worried. The point of a blog is that only the people who want to read it read it. So if you're still here, I guess you believe me. And that's a really great feeling. Thank you!

A moment with my shattered dreams

Like any other child, I've had a lot of dreams about what I'd like my life to be like. Frustratingly, because of my allergy, most of them are going to be impossible.

I wanted to be a daycare worker.

I was only in daycare a few months, and most of the time I had a rash somewhere on my body. But there was something attractive about it, something fun, and I decided that when I was old enough to get a job I was going to work at a daycare center.

Which I now know I can't do because of snack time, and because little kids are often fed treats with peanuts before their parents bring them in. So I'd need to find a daycare that was entirely peanut-free.

I wanted to be a babysitter.

You can blame this one on the Babysitters Club books I used to read. But I can't do this one for the same reason I can't be a daycare worker, and also because no one is going to want to wipe down all the possibly nut-contaminated surfaces in their house to accommodate the teenager who's going to watch their kids for a few hours.

I wanted to be a flight attendant.

Flying seemed glamorous and cool, and what better way to see the world? But, of course, there's the whole they-serve-peanuts-on-airplanes problem, not to mention that I'd have to eat at restaurants and I'm extremely uncomfortable eating food I haven't made myself.

I wanted to be an actress.

I'm allergic to makeup. Which sucks, because I think I'd look great in green eye shadow. 

I wanted to have a summer job.

I can't work with food. At all. I can't serve it, I can't bag it, I can't stack it on the shelves. So that means the only stores I could possibly get hired at would be ones that sell clothing or electronics, both sought-after jobs that someone else always got first.

I wanted to be a vet.

Cat allergy.

I wanted to work in a pet store.

Cat allergy. And allergy to wood chips.

So, after careful consideration, I decided to become a writer.

How am I doing?

Do they just sit around waiting for a chance to call bullshit?

When I was in fifth grade my parents discovered the magic of almond butter. They had me try some, and although I didn't really like it, I said it was nice because they were so happy. They were thrilled that I could now get one step closer to a normal childhood and packed an almond butter and jelly sandwich in my lunch the next day.
Which prompted shouts of, "SHE'S NOT REALLY ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!"
I tried to explain that it was ALMOND butter, but no one was interested in listening. They didn't want the truth to get in the way of their fun, and so I sat there crying on my sandwich while boys climbed over the tables to spread the joyous news that I was a liar.
Several years later the same thing happened again, this time while I was eating a Hershey bar. No one wanted to hear me explain that their chocolate bars are manufactured in their own facility, far away from peanuts. They were all too busy being loud about how they'd caught me.
Don't these people have better things to do than sit around waiting for a chance to accuse someone?

Next we'll rob you blind to teach good money management

A common argument by schools, mine included, is that they shouldn't have to enact policies for allergic kids because it would give them a false sense of security and prevent them from learning the self-protection skills they would need to live in the real world. As someone who went to a school with such a philosophy, I'm calling bullshit.

My school had no peanut-free table because they didn't want allergic kids to feel different. Which sounds wonderful, until you remember that we are different. There was also nothing available with which I could clean a table, so I was basically spending my lunches playing a low-stakes game of russian roulette and hoping my arms weren't going to break out in a rash. After a few weeks I started carrying wet wipes around and creating my own personal peanut-free zone.
Oh, and the death threat girl I discussed earlier quickly learned that she could evict me from any table I'd chosen simply by sitting down at it and opening a peanut butter cup. She had hours of fun doing this.
So, in my opinion, the lack of a peanut-free table attempted to gloss over my differences and encourage me to pretend to be normal, which is a good way to get myself killed. Probably not a helpful life skill.

My school had no list of alternative candy. Every year I would think, "This is it. We're finally too old to be rewarded with candy." And every year I would be proven wrong. I was a Junior in high school when I walked out, so who knows, maybe in Senior year they no longer throw candy around the room. But I doubt it.
Whenever a teacher pulled out a bag of candy and announced a quiz game I would lean forward to see the label, and about half the time I recognized it as a brand that uses peanuts or is processed on equipment that also handles products containing peanuts, and I had to go sit in the hall for the rest of the class. Which kind of defeats the purpose of school, don't you think?
I know how to walk out of a room, so don't tell me I'm learning any important surviving-the-world techniques, and I'm certainly not learning the subject material. The only thing being banished from quiz games teaches me is which teachers are nice, caring people who truly want all their students to succeed, and which ones are only there for the coffee and the chance to hand out detentions. Probably not a helpful life skill.

My school didn't give a damn what was wrong with you, you were going to eat what you made in home ec!
I had a lot of problems with home ec. Firstly, the teacher was a neat freak who made you Lysol your chair if she caught you sitting on your feet, which I liked to do because I was a small kid and wanted my head on the same level as everyone else's. Secondly, the teacher didn't really see anything wrong with pairing me up with the previously mentioned death threat girl for a module on crotchet, and didn't ask her to stop talking about killing me even though our station was the one closest to her desk. And thirdly, even though I requested I not be given a module for which I would have to cook, she gave me a module for which I would have to cook. And nothing in the fridge had a label.
I actually have no idea why nothing in the fridge had a label. She told me it had to do with the school not being allowed to promote one brand name over another, which seemed like kind of a stupid rule and also meant that there were no ingredients lists. So I told her okay, I'll cook, but I want to wear plastic gloves and I'm not eating any of it.
She nixed the plastic gloves and told me that I was going to be eating all of it.
Everything in that fridge had been opened and who knows who had had their fingers in it, and there weren't any ingredients lists for me to check, and there was a jar of peanut butter staring me down from the top shelf, and she wanted me to cook with this stuff with my bare hands and then eat it. I wondered, did she also want me to call the ambulance myself?
I refused to eat any of it, forcing my disgruntled module partner to deal with the half-rate food we made before the teacher dropped by to do a plate check and make sure every morsel had been consumed. By the end of the week we were halving all the measurements so my partner didn't explode.
Honestly, what was the point of that? It didn't teach me anything, except how to lie to a teacher and get away with it. It actually seems to go beyond refusing to make accommodations and enter the realm of deliberately setting students up to fail, or to get themselves killed.

My school had a zero-tolerance policy with no exceptions. I knew a girl who had asthma, and to use her inhaler she had to ask her teacher for permission to go to the office, and then she had to walk there (because running is strictly prohibited no matter the circumstance), convince the evil gatekeepers (aka the skeptical secretaries) that she needed to see the nurse, and then she got her inhaler. To get a disgusting yet helpful Benadryl tablet I had to do the same, although my teachers rarely let me out of the room and the secretaries liked to spend a few minutes trying to trick me into admitting something before letting me make my request to the nurse. And every time I was in there they would all try to convince me to leave my EpiPens with them for safekeeping instead of, I don't know, carrying them on my person like the emergency lifesaving devices that they were? Because it's so practical to have me walk to the office while I'm going into anaphylactic shock.
The only life-skill this taught me is that I should never freely admit I'm carrying medication, and that I should always keep some disgusting Benadryl tablets in my bag and should take on in a bathroom stall when I think I need it.

I'm just like Jane!

My father and I love to watch The Mentalist. In one episode (spoiler alert!) we get to see Patrick Jane consciously mess with his body's reactions to fake alcohol poisoning. He goes the whole mile, even influencing his heart rate and blood pressure to make it look real.

And I, apparently, can do the same thing. Although my reasons are less honorable; I don't want to catch a killer, I just want to get out of class, and I might also want your sympathy, although opinions vary on just how devious I am. 

You see, someone at my school read an article that said that allergic people can actually make themselves have a reaction by focusing hard enough on what it feels like to have a reaction. 

This was fascinating! It explained that weird nut girl perfectly! We all knew it wasn't possible to be that allergic; she must be doing it to herself!

The article made the rounds, and soon I couldn't cough without half a dozen of my fellow thirteen-year-olds furiously cursing me out for daring to try and pull this crap again.

Opinions varied on why I was actually doing it. Some people thought I didn't realize what I was doing, I was just so helplessly paranoid I wound myself up into fits of panic. I was clearly sick and I needed psychiatric help. Others thought I wanted to be special. I wanted adults to feel sorry for me and treat me differently. I was so desperate to have a disability I was doing everything in my power to fake one. And some people just thought I didn't have the balls to cut class the traditional way.

I showed people that I had a rash, that my skin was patched with angry red. They told me I'd rubbed my skin raw with my nails in an attempt to make it look real. I coughed and coughed, covering my mouth like I wanted to stop, but they told me they knew I was just a good actress. 

And I wasn't sure whether or not they were right. I mean, so many people furious at a thirteen-year-old girl for being sick, shouting at her that what she was claiming wasn't even possible? How could I not begin to believe them?

I asked my parents whether they were right. Was I faking all of this? Did I have something wrong with me mentally? 

My parents had my doctor write the school a note about my allergy. They took it into the office and made sure everyone saw it, and they asked to speak with all my teachers and re-explained what I'd already told them, and left the note with the school nurse to put in my file.

But as soon as my parents left everyone went back to treating me like I was crazy. My teachers told me to stop being dramatic, my classmates shouted at me for being such a bitch. And then they all took it one step further and demanded to know why I was pretending to have an allergy in the first place.

Now it wasn't just the attacks I was faking.

It was the whole allergy.

I really, really hated myself for daring to be allergic to peanuts. Clearly it wasn't right. Clearly it wasn't acceptable. I should just do what everyone was telling me to and stop having the allergy.

But I couldn't do it. 

And there was something else I couldn't do.

I thought, if I was already doing it, already subconsciously faking to get myself out of class, what was wrong with doing it deliberately? If I can't stop, if it's a compulsion that I have no control over, I might as well make it useful and do it to get out of a class I really hate, right? 

So I tried it during math class.

I concentrated really hard on the way it felt to have a reaction. The way my neck and chin prickled. The hot, unpleasant taste in my mouth. The way light was too bright, and the compulsion to cough that I couldn't fight, even when I was barely getting enough air to breathe. 

Nothing happened.

Okay, that was okay, I'd just pretend I was feeling it. It only had to look real. So I scratched at my arms a bit and tried to recreate a rash.

It didn't look right. Rashes are patchy-looking, this just looked like I'd scratched too hard. Why couldn't I do it? If I'd done it so many times before, why couldn't I do it now???

Maybe because I'd actually been telling the truth?

Not that it mattered to everyone else. They all still hated me. Which is probably why they had no problem handing out death threats; I clearly wasn't allergic, so the threat wasn't even real. And why the hell did the school let me get a service dog for a condition I didn't have? That didn't even exist?

I hate this town. 

And the feeling appears to be mutual.

Death threats

When I was in junior high I did something that irritated another girl. I'm not sure what. I just remember that one day she tapped me on the shoulder, and when I turned to her she smiled at me and told me that she was going to take a peanut and kill me.
I slapped her. I was so angry I could barely think. Not about what she'd said, but the look on her face when she'd said it. Positively gleeful.
I went to the office and said that I wanted to speak to the principal because someone had given me a death threat. He was very serious about it, very official, until I mentioned that it wasn't a knife or a gun she'd threatened me with, but a peanut. Then he relaxed. He told me that she had only been teasing me, and talked over my protests to say that kids will be kids, everyone is bullied in school. Then he told me that he could suspend me for hitting her, and if anyone was ever being mean to me again I shouldn't fight back, because if I fought back we would both have to be punished.
The next day she found me again and re-told her story, expanding the plot a little to include her going to my house and killing my pets and smearing their bodies with peanut butter so I couldn't bury them, and then killing me slowly in the empty house when I came home and was crying.
This time I didn't hit her. I didn't touch her. I didn't even insult her. I just went back to the principal, who reminded me that this happens to every kid before sending me back out of his office.
And then she would not leave me alone.
And I completely believed her. I believed that if she ever got an opportunity, if we were ever alone together, she would kill me. She looked happiest when she was imaging scenarios of my death.
And she wouldn't stop touching me. She sat behind me in third period, and she loved to brush her hands along the back of my neck and whisper threats in my ear. I hated being touched. I knew that someone's breakfast, or their hand lotion, or their pet cat could make me sick if they touched me. But my teachers told me to just ignore her, and my principal ordered me to stop using reporting her as an excuse to get out of class.
And she laughed at me. She looked so happy. I wanted to attack her and scratch her face off with my nails, but I'd been told that I would be suspended if I hurt her.
I didn't want to go anywhere alone. If I met her alone, off school grounds, I knew she'd try to kill me. But as long as I was only seeing her in the classroom she would never have a chance, and all she'd be able to do to me was imagine in my ear.
And she had friends. After a few weeks there were others who realized that no one would stop them if they wanted to threaten me. People passed me notes with threats on them, and they shouldered past me in the hall, shouting "PEANUT!" as they went. I took the notes to the office, but by now I'd so annoyed the principal that the secretaries threw me out as soon as I walked in the door. My English teacher was the only one who took the notes seriously, and she called their parents herself instead of trying to go through the principal.
I started getting sick much more often than before. My teachers got mad at me, said this was just my latest excuse to get out of class. I'd always gotten skin rashes, always felt a little off, but now it was like I was always prickly, always gray, always on the edge of sick. I wanted to tear the skin off my fingers or slam my hands in a door, do something to them because they always hurt now.
I started wearing long sleeves, and I pulled them over my hands before I touched anything. It made me feel better.
And I got used to death threats. I learned to recognize the voice of boredom and the voice of hatred and know which threats I should fear. And I learned to pretend I felt fine, and to quickly get out of the way of someone who wanted to touch me.
And sometime in eighth grade, they stopped caring. I got boring. And the girl who I'd been so sure would kill me seemed to hit some kind of anger wall, and she lashed out at everyone, and now she was the one being bullied.
But I spent a year afraid for my life, and none of my teachers cared. I told my parents a few times, when it got bad, when I was really angry, and they called the school and my teachers brushed them off and didn't actually do anything, and it upset them so much I just stopped bringing it up.
And people still threatened me, every now and then, when they felt like it.
I guess that's why they thought it would be okay to hurt my service dog.
That's why I left, you know. Someone kicked my service dog. And my teachers didn't see anything wrong with it.
So now I have a blog.
What else am I supposed to do?

Things I didn't realize

A lot of things changed for me when I got Poodleface. Some of them I was anticipating, but some surprised me. Things like:

• Constantly having my hands full. I loop Poodleface's leash around my right thumb and hold any slack leash in my right hand. I slide my left hand along the leash to let out or take back leash, depending on the size of the crowd we're in and any obstacles we might need to navigate around. This means that I can't carry many things, have to transfer the leash to my left hand before I can shake hands, and have to use a cart or a basket when I'm shopping for more than one item at a time. 
• Hearing people gossip about me when I'm right there. It's apparently socially acceptable to point out someone with a service dog and debate with your friend what might be wrong with them. It's apparently not socially acceptable to turn to people who are gossiping about you, smile exaggeratedly, and explain all the things they were wondering in an overly sugary voice. Which I don't think is very fair.
• Having to deal with someone else's switch from anger to deep embarrassment without making them feel worse. Some people politely take me aside and ask for confirmation that my dog is a service dog, but others feel the need to shout from across the store that I'd better take my dog outside this instant. Then they inevitably feel like dicks when they figure out it's a service dog, and I feel like I have to console the person who was just ranting at me. It's uncomfortable for both of us. 
• Having to wonder if that compliment was meant for me or for my dog. A cashier once said, "You look beautiful!" to which I responded, "Thanks." Then she turned three shades of red and confided that she'd actually been speaking to my dog. And at a school competition I once incurred the wrath of a judge by expressing annoyance that she jumped up to greet and talk to the dog of the contestant she was supposed to be judging before paying any attention to me. My supervising teacher later showed me the long, angry note she'd left on my score card about how I was far too rude and sensitive about my dog and should really learn some self-control. Excuse me for wanting to be spoken to before my four-legged companion who doesn't understand you and can't answer.
• Never, ever being alone. Poodleface sleeps in my room and comes with me whenever I leave the house. My only poodle-free moments are when I'm showering, and even then only when I lock the bathroom door because he's figured out how to open it. 
• Not getting sick anymore. I didn't really believe it could happen, but it did. No more painful rashes, no more coughing fits, no more sick headaches. I still sneeze far too much from my allergies to dust, pollen, and perfume, but I no longer feel horrible several times a month. And it's great.

What the eff happened?

Something that has puzzled me for many years: why do so many people think I'm a liar?
My parents did what all good parents are supposed to do. They got in touch with my school every year, made sure all my teachers knew about my allergy, dropped off a doctor's note saying I should be able to carry an EpiPen, and generally reminded everyone not to poison their daughter. So what the eff happened to convince a very vocal portion of the community that I'm boldly faking it for attention???
I've had teachers who were wonderful, and I've had friends who were wonderful, but I've also been approached by people who want me to know they think I'm a lying sack of crap.
One of my assigned guidance counselors, when I asked her to help me with some kids who were taunting me about peanuts, told me that it was because they knew what I was saying was ridiculous, and if I dropped the whole peanut thing and ate school lunch like a normal person everyone would like me again. My art teacher, although she seemed to like me, never understood why I wanted her to check ingredients lists, and I was constantly storming out of the art room under an irritated black cloud because she'd brought us yet another snack I couldn't be in the room with. Kids have come up to me in the lunch room or the halls and asked me why I'm so dramatic about my allergy, and I've been issued one or two detentions, which I opted not to show up for, because I left a room to go to the nurse to get treatment for a reaction the teacher didn't believe I was having. So what did I do to convince these people that I'm a liar?
And not everyone stops the conspiracy train with the idea that I crave the spotlight. In a terrifying shouting match with a teacher I was very intimidated by, I was asked why I felt the need to control everyone around me. All this because I asked him if, this time, he could bring us a candy I could have too. And when I got my service dog the shit really hit the fan, with people snarling at me that it must be wonderful for me to be able to bring my pet to school.
I have wondered for years and I am really at a loss for explanations, what did I do?!?!?!?!
For a while, even after leaving school, I secretly feared I was all the things they'd said I was. That subconsciously I really did want attention.
Then I read about the conflict in Florida.
For those of you who didn't follow it, a group of parents decided to protest the security measures an elementary school had put in place to protect a six-year-old with peanut allergies. And I mean protest protest, as in, they stood outside with signs. Because of a six-year-old girl.
So now I'm hopeful that maybe it's the world that's crazy and not me. Kind of like that line from one of the more poorly-written episodes of Star Trek, "If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"
Well, maybe there is something wrong with the universe if it's so determined to be angry with allergic children. So what can I do to change the world, besides blog about it?