A three-year-old boy who attends a school in Oshawa, Ontario, spotted a delicious-looking candy on the floor of his classroom, and as three-year-olds often do, he scooped it up and ate it. That seemingly innocuous, typical little-kid decision nearly cost him his life because Emmett Huggard has a life-threatening peanut allergy.
This is why you have to stop lying about food allergies
We allergy parents send our kids off to school, hoping today's not the day our kids go into anaphylactic shock due to some mistake, so I can only imagine how shaken this student's parents are feeling. Emmett attends kindergarten in a school where nut and peanut products are banned, so how was it that this candy was on the floor of his classroom? I know the immediate reaction will be to accuse some parent of being negligent, but we don't know that that's the case. Just yesterday I found candy in my son's pocket that he had squirreled away after Halloween, and I like to think I'm fairly on top of pocket and backpack checks for just this reason.
It could have been a parent who figured it wouldn't hurt anyone. Or it could have just been a candy slipped into a kid's pocket. It's hard to say, but the fact is that this little boy had to be injected with an EpiPen to save his life after one little candy was consumed. Food allergies are very, very serious.
What it's like parenting a child with life-threatening allergies
The key to managing allergies - and to keeping people safe - is education. I know people are sick of hearing about food allergies. I read the comments on the our Facebook page when allergy articles are posted. At first I was angry that people could be so careless with someone else's life. At first I was enraged over comments like, "If eating a peanut can kill you, maybe you're meant to die", but now I realize that these things are spoken out of pure ignorance in the truest sense of the word. Most people don't have the capacity to empathize with something they feel is truly not their problem. But this is a problem for everyone because if someone inadvertently harms another child, they have to live with that too.
Just recently, a seven-year-old boy died of anaphylaxis, and every one of these stories is so painful to read. Food allergies are deadly. They're not just an inconvenience, they're something we wouldn't wish on anyone, but we have to live with daily. They're unpredictable, can appear out of the blue to absolutely anyone, and they kill in minutes.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record: I think we could all use a little practice with our empathy.
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