I'd like to think that I'm not so unbearably petty that I have to force someone whose life isn't so limited (because hey-- not everyone IS allergic to a ubiquitous food, and not everyone is contact sensitive, YK?) into walking in MY shoes just so that I don't look like such a loon.
I think that's my new favorite quote.
Honestly - the people who think we're crazy are ALWAYS going to think we're crazy. It's taken me years and years to get there, but it's so freeing once I did. Mylan's ads aren't going to help or hurt that, so more power to them if they want to get more Epi-Pens in mothers' hands, regardless of how they do it.
Food allergies are an individual disease. When it comes to walking in each other's shoes, we're all Cinderella.
Awww-- thanks.
Those of us who are-- er, "lucky" enough to have multiple generations/family members with varying food allergies know this one. Management is highly individual because the condition is, too.
As noted before, this is one that we live every day in our house. My DD and I both have to be a lot more cautious than DH does, in spite of the ubiquity of his allergen (soy) relative to ours. It's a matter of sensitivity and threshold in our specific circumstances. Another family might have exactly the opposite situation, with a PA child who is far less limited than a soy-allergic parent.
There isn't anything wrong with how any of the three of us manages, but it sure looks dramatically different to outsiders. It has to be confusing to them, I think. We're like the three bears.
DH seldom mentions his FA in a restaurant, (though he's VERY careful what he eats when out, and avoids high risk items completely), and DD's allergies are so limiting that she's never set foot in our local schools and has eaten in only a small handful of restaurants in her entire life. I'm somewhere in between those two extremes. It's as though calling us all "food allergic" is ludicrous, since there really ought to be two or even three different terms.
I think this leads us to be a little more forgiving of ignorance in others. People really
can't know what they don't know, in some ways. If they've seen "food allergy" equal my DH's reality, they
can't really understand what my DD's reality is in that context. Seeing/experiencing is truly believing. I would have been skeptical, too. I'm oddly glad for Joel Stein himself, in that he's learned something by walking a mile in the shoes of those he dismissed as crazy... but I'm certainly not glad for his child, nor would I really have "wished" this on anyone's family. Mostly I'm terribly sad for them, and to have the diagnosis play out amidst that kind of publicity and eating a heaping plate of crow must have been truly god-awful.
And amen to never saying "never" with this thing. I've felt off-balance for a decade and I've finally decided that I'm just never going to be that sure of myself again. LOL.
I've known those medical people that seem to have profound cognitive dissonance at work, too. I'm not sure
how to reach those people. Because they already "know" in the hypothetical sense, but they've based their decision-making on some form of denial that I can't quite wrap my head around. So I'm not sure that there is a good way to break through that without making them uncomfortable. They've constructed a world-view in which they are "not like
those people" despite all evidence to the contrary, and they can rationalize (or just deflect/avoid) endlessly to just not face the reality that they
ought to be carrying emergency meds. That would be admitting that they
are like "those" people. KWIM?
It's the same logic that some people use to avoid recieving public assistance even while your kids are hungry. As long as you avoid thinking about it, you can avoid facing the fact that you ARE one of those "unfortunate" people. There's some really interesting psychology surrounding this, for sure.
I'm curious to know what your take on that strange quirky thought process is, Boo.
