Yes, I
really wish that I could bottle what the ER staff saw so that every FA family had it available as an "Elixir of Enlightenment" for use with schools, family, physicians, basically anyone that is clueless and/or obstructionist.
Better still if, before any human being could open his or her mouth to trash "neurotic" FA parents and over-protective measures versus the "rights" of others.... that a lightning bolt would shoot down out of the blue and instantaneously provide such a person with a firsthand witnessing of events like these. The sheer horror of it is hard to convey in words. I just want to scream when I read things like this... I want to shout to EVERYONE, EVERYWHERE-- that
this!!!!!!-- THIS is what we are up against. FOR REAL-- every meal, every surface, every location, every MINUTE of every day, this is our reality. And that if I seem to others to be something of a pain in the backside about food-food-food everywhere, all the time, maybe they ought to walk a few miles in my daughter's shoes and see the world through her eyes and ours before they say even ONE more word about the rights of others to live without being 'inconvenienced' by her safe inclusion in activities that have no business involving food to start with.
I'm so sick to death of people not understanding what they are
choosing to do-- oh, who am I kidding?
INSIST UPON, in spite of pleading and begging otherwise when they include food in activities that also involve children with known LTFA. It's an
unecessary risk. They wouldn't take it on in a million years if they knew just how real it was. I'm sure of it. Nobody in their right MIND would. That's my litmus test, personally. When I (well, or DD does, at this point) explain the situation, and the person still has the CAJONES (pardon my language) to say "Oh, sure-- but the other kids can still have _______ and she can just be careful, right?" I know in that moment that they can't get it and never will, short of seeing my daughter fighting for her life right in front of them as the direct and obvious result of their willful stupidity in insisting on food-food-food-food...
I'm often told by those same people that I just need to "understand" where they are coming from and be willing to "compromise." Well, hey-- news flash. I
know where they are coming from. A place of IGNORANCE. Because I used to live there, too, tyvm-- before I had the epiphany of watching my kid almost die a few times. Until they can comprehend just how little it takes (and really, in this particular instance, this was a MASSIVE ingestion-- way more than DD has ever eaten-- EVER) then I have nowhere to go with people like this because they truly can't wrap their heads around it. They really do, on some level, think that we're exaggerating. Because their own experience insists that it's impossible for what we say to be real. Makes me crazy.
Total rant. I know. Sorry. It's just
all so bloody unecessary, and it makes me FURIOUS.