TEN

I feel sorry for kids nowadays. They may have so much that I didn't have when I was a kid. They have the internet, they have cell phones, video games and they have Facebook. But one thing they don't have that I had in abundance, is freedom. You see, even when I was five years old, I pretty much had the run of the neighborhood. Summers were a great time for me as a kid. The entire neighborhood was my playground. So I would leave home and run to the neighbor's house to pet the cat. And I would leave home to run to another neighbor's house to swim. I would go back home to eat, then go back to my neighbor's, the Hawkins family, across the street and pet the cat.

One time when I was petting the cat, Mrs Hawkins, the mom of the kid next door, took one look at me and became very upset. You see, I had broken out into a rash. Turns out I was very allergic to the cat. I so loved petting that cat. His name was Buttons and he was a tabby and he just loved getting petted. But unfortunately, my body did not like me petting the cat. So being a very allergic child, I was permanently banned from petting cats. Not that it really stopped me that often. Every once in a while I would tentatively try a pet and invariably end up feeling tired and itchy eyed. To get rid of the allergy meant me lying down and taking a nap. Afterwards, I always felt much better. And that started, of course, a regimen of me going to the doctors to get an 'allergy shot.'

Nowadays, I don't get allergy shots, but my kid Izzy does. Poor Izzy, she inherited an allergy thing. She's got allergies alright, but they are different from what I had. Izzy has allergies to nuts. One time when she was about four years old, she and I were sharing a little bag of trail mix. It was a tropical mix, with bananas, pineapples and pistachios. She became very lethargic and fell asleep. I didn't think much of it until one day at home. It was when we had finished having Chinese food.

I put the kids to bed around 9 o'clock. An hour later, I heard Izzy crying. She was all so puffy, her eyes had puffed up so much, they were swollen shut. Her lips, well, they were about to explode, they had swollen so much. The changes in her face and all the swelling made her look alien, all normal human features were so distorted that she did not look human at all. I had no clue what was happening, so I swept her up and drove fast to the hospital. They took one look at her when I was checking in and said, "Take her in stat." It was only then I realized that if the swelling had gone to her throat that I could have lost her. After all, it's the patients in the ER room who are the ones most likely to go who get taken care of first. The comforting factor was that I was already in the hospital and they were taking care of her, which meant she was where she was supposed to be to have the right treatment.

The other allergy scare was when I had a bunch of Alia's friends who were around 7 to 8 years old. Izzy and I had just eaten a few cashews, when I noticed once again, Izzy was starting to swell up. Not knowing what to do with all those kids, I simply ordered everyone into the van and headed for the nearest hospital, which luckily was the Granada Hills Hospital, only five minutes away from that point. Unfortunately, Alia's friend Natalee had never ever been to the hospital in her life causing her to freak out. Apparently, she was born at home and her mom was completely paranoid about her being at the hospital.
Luckily, the paranoia only served to help the situation, the mom came and whisked everyone away, so I could concentrate on Izzy. Izzy spent 8 hours in the hospital and had hives for the rest of the week.

Since then, it seems as if she's outgrown the allergies. But I'm always on the lookout for subtle changes in Izzy to see if an allergy attack (or anaphylactic shock, as they call it) is eminent.