I’m starting this blog as a favor to my parents and my doctor, and so, it feels a bit like a homework, even if professors and TAs are usually more impersonal than parents and doctors. It feels very strange to have a presence on the web that my parents will look at and critique, but so it goes.
I’m writing this blog, because I have more than my fair share of physical frailty. Oh, I look healthy enough; I have a so-called invisible disability, but my illness, multiple allergies, chemical sensitivities, and immune deficiencies (and asthma, you can’t forget the asthma), means that I have to be constantly on my guard. You see, I’m my one worst enemy. My immune system attacks the rest of me, and while it does so neglects to defend me against microbial assault.
I spent less than two months at school my junior year of high school, and at the end of it, I decided enough was enough, and I wasn’t going back. I think my parents only agreed because they were afraid that one day I would come home from school as a corpse, victim of my immune system’s friendly fire. Even if they hadn’t agreed with me, I couldn’t go back, because I was terrified, and sick, and miserable, and tired of coming home from school unable to breathe, throwing up, unable to stay awake, or worst yet, unable to think, simply because someone wore perfume, or wore the wrong kind of hairspray, or smoked on the roof.
As gut wrenchingly terrifying as not being able to breathe is, it pales in comparison with not being able to think. I have neurological reactions triggered by allergies that send me into seizure-like trances. I run, I bite, I scream, I can’t remember anything afterwards, and I can’t speak. “Waking up” after one and having no idea what I have done or who saw me, or who I may have hurt is bad enough, but I could just as easily not “wake up”, but die as I did something no sane person would do.
I haven’t had this kind of reaction outside of controlled circumstances for years now, but it isn’t a fear that ever leaves. I take my shots, carry my medication, eat all the right foods and none of the wrong ones, and do my best to avoid environmental triggers, and I’m mostly successful.
I’m mostly successful due to the work of one amazing woman, my doctor, Dorothy Calabrese, who took one look at the scratching, biting, constantly sick 9 year old I once was, and said “I can help!” and actually told the truth. Thanks to her, I can eat real food, go to school, have friends, and live my life. I owe her my life, my sanity, and the ten years since I began treatment. A little blog is a small payment, a very very small payment.
