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?

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. 

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.