“This is the EpiPen. She must carry it everywhere.” I nodded, hoping that I did not look as nervous as I felt.
A friend of our 9-year-old had come for the day, and before her mother could leave our house she had, in the nicest way possible, to explain the extra responsibilities of hosting a girl with a severe allergy to nuts and chocolate.
Given that nuts and chocolate make up half our family’s food pyramid, you will understand my anxiety. We have an entire drawer in the kitchen dedicated to nuts. There’s peanut butter in the fridge, Ovaltine in the cupboards, and Nutella, that deadly Italian mix of chocolate and hazelnuts, pretty much everywhere in between.
“If she has a reaction, it will happen very quickly. Just lift the top of the pen, and push hard into her leg, here,” the mother said, indicating the child’s thigh. That action would cause a needle to shoot out and dispense a life-saving supply of adrenaline.
She smiled. “And then you call 911.”
I nodded again, and I’m pretty sure that at this point I looked as nervous as I felt. I also wanted to throw my arms around the woman. If it was scary to care for such a vulnerable girl for a day, how much scarier — how profoundly terrifying — would it be, to the child’s mother.
At the door, the woman patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry. We just need to be careful.”
Allergies seem to be everywhere these days. You can’t send peanut butter sandwiches to school, or put nuts in cookies for bake sales (or even, in some towns, sell homemade baked goods at all), and of course the Washington spring exacts its own toll in sneezes and itchy eyes from those affected by pollen.
Until recently I thought of allergies as other peoples’ misfortune, but that was before we learned the underlying cause of our smallest daughter’s persistent cough.
That she has an allergy has excited envious admiration on the part of a four-year-old playmate of hers. Rather than be left behind, he too has developed hypersensitivity and has diagnosed himself with “vegetable allergy,” “spicy food allergy,” and, his mother says, “nap allergy.”
The play date had been going nicely, meanwhile, when my daughter called to me from the next room. “I think it’s OK but she’s having a reaction.”
“What!?”
My heart banged in my chest. I rushed through. “Are you OK? Can you breathe?”
“Sure,” she said nonchalantly, holding out her arm to show an inflamed patch of skin surrounding a small white bump.
“Oh. It’s a mosquito bite.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she shrugged. “Come on,” she said, turning to my daughter. “Let’s go back outside.”
It was only when the door had closed behind them that I remembered to breathe again.
NOTE: On Thursday I wrote about teenagers competing in a marshmallow-eating contest. Some readers worried that it might inspire others to try what, according to urban legend, seems a deadly gamble. It is true that a 12-year-old girl choked while playing Chubby Bunny in 1999 and that a 32-year-old woman met the same fate in 2006. I leave it to Washington Examiner readers to determine whether, beyond amusing grossness, the game is too risky.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
