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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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?

Meet Riley! (and the trouble with being safe)

This is a news video about another girl with an allergen alert dog.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqrdtqJPBLE
In the video Riley's mother tells us that her daughter has almost died six times. Sounds impressive, doesn't it? It's the kind of statement that really drives home just how bad her allergy really is.
To qualify for an allergen alert dog I had to have a recent allergy test proving that my allergy was as bad as I said it was. So my parents drove me to a nearby city to see the only allergist in the state (we really do live in the middle of nowhere) and see if my allergy was still just as severe.
The first thing the allergist asked me was how many times I'd been to the emergency room in the last year. Rather proud of myself, I told him none. To which he smiled and reassured me that I didn't need a service dog, I clearly wasn't that allergic.
Hold on, hold it, hold the phone! I'd stayed out of the emergency room by being responsible about my allergy! I'd carried chewable Benadryl tablets everywhere and taken one whenever I was having a reaction, before it got bad. I had turned down numerous invitations to eat out. I'd packed my lunch every day for school, and I'd cleaned the table with a wet wipe before I sat down. I never, never ate anything that wasn't packaged, sealed, and with a clear list on ingredients, or that I hadn't made myself. Therefore, I hadn't had any reactions from ingesting peanuts, which are the kind most likely to be lethal in under five minutes. I'd had lots of reactions from physical contact or from the smell or from inhaling peanut dust, but they were less likely to be severe and I'd always taken medication. I thought I should be commended for my diligence, and that it was obvious I must be very allergic if I was still managing to get sick from peanuts even with all I was doing to stay safe.
The allergist wasn't the first person I'd heard this from. Adults my parents had attempted to explain me to found it hard to believe that I could be as allergic as they said I was if they didn't have at least one horror story about a doctor pulling me back from the brink.
I don't like having reactions. They hurt. A lot. I think it makes sense that I go out of my way to avoid them.
My parents convinced the allergist that I should be tested anyway, just to humor them. We didn't get the results of the test until a few days later, by phone call, when we were back home. Which is too bad, because I would have liked to watch his face when he learned that yes, I did in fact have a severe allergy, yes, it was bad enough to be lethal, and yes, I did need a service dog.
If I was diabetic or asthmatic or something I wouldn't have to tell people a near-death horror story to make them believe me. It's irritating that I need to do so for an allergy.

From behind enemy lines

I like to stay up-to-date on allergy news, so in addition to checking out the articles in the Health section every time I'm on CNN, I regularly Google for news about peanut allergies with all the search terms I can think of, and I always read the comments. Occasionally I'll also come across a mother's blog about her peanut-allergic children, one of the things that inspired me to start a blog of my own, and it's nice to know that there are others who have the same problems.
Given my obvious stand on the issue of food allergies, there are some things in my search history that would confuse the heck out of any secret agents hacking my computer. Not only do I search for articles that say peanut allergies are real, I also search for ones that say they're all faked. In addition to making my blood boil, they tell me the kind of misconceptions I need to be on the lookout for. Here are the things I've discovered:

1. "Food allergies are a figment of the imagination of hysterical parents." This one is annoyingly hard to disprove in any sort of logical argument. It's a stereotype, and even if it wasn't, a certain amount of hysteria is justified when you have a severely allergic child.
2. "Most people who claim to have a food allergy really just don't like that food." I once saw a cartoon where a muppet-like creature claimed to be allergic to flour when it was raw, but not when it was baked into cookies, because he didn't want to have to help bake them but still wanted to eat them. It's a trick I'm sure lots of small children have pulled to attempt to get out of eating vegetables. This one's also annoying in that I'm sure the person at one point met or heard about a kid who did just that, but I would say to them that the difference between the two is that the faker will seem joyful about the whole thing, while the truthful child will honestly feel left out. 
3. "If the kid is that allergic then what the hell are they doing out in the world?" Also annoying, because, as much as I hate to admit it, they have a point. However, I have a counter-point: "Would you have me live my life by internet proxy from the 'safety' of my living room sofa because you can't wait five minutes to open a peanut butter cup? Would you also light up a smoke in front of an asthmatic because it's 'their problem'?"
4. "My kid has a right to eat peanut butter!" This one doesn't annoy me so much as it makes me weep for the future of our nation. Your kid also has a right to keep and bear arms, but we have anti-gun policies around school zones because no one likes it when kids get hurt and/or killed. 
5. "Oh come on. It's not that bad." I must admit, I didn't get this one off the internet but instead heard it from various teachers, acquaintances, and family members. Very annoying, to say the least. Don't talk down to me until you've walked a mile in my shoes, or until you've spent an evening throwing up because those cookies, unbeknownst to you, were made in a facility that also processes peanuts. Oh, and then there's the migraine. You'll have one of those too. Not to mention a flu-like fatigue and most likely a rash.

As infuriating as it is for me to read about these things, the comment section usually makes me smile and nod in agreement. Even in the stronghold of the enemy there are plenty of people willing to tell their stories in an attempt to discredit everything they've just read.