Feeding Eden by Susan Weissman

Author:Susan Weissman [Weissman, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781402789694
Published: 2012-03-06T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

MEDICINE MOM

One mid-February morning years ago, I was teaching a middle-school English class when a fishy odor wafted into my classroom. Pregnant with Dayna that year, I spent September to December excusing myself during classes to nearly retch in the girls’ bathroom. Leaning my head against the cool stalls, I wished for many things. Sometimes I wished I had chosen to work in a corporate environment where teenagers weren’t allowed to roam like wolfhounds, sniffing me out. Sometimes I wished I hadn’t eaten breakfast in my puppy dog optimism that this time scrambled eggs would be just the thing. I always wanted to empty my stomach, but as I later confirmed when carrying Eden, my pregnancy wiring cut short at vomiting and left me in perpetual nausea.

That year I had a very allergic student named Alex. He was often absent, and it affected his already poor academic organization. During our fall parent-teacher conference, Alex’s parents described his allergies and asthma as well as the resulting infections and colds. It seemed ironic to me that Alex was allergic to innumerable icons of childhood, including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, puppies, and stuffed animals. How odd, I thought.

The day of the fish odor, Alex’s class was scheduled just before lunch. The school building was so narrowly vertical that it gave the cafeteria fumes efficient passage up into my classroom. For two periods, students had burst through my door and thumped into their desks. “Ewww, that’s foul! It really is! No way am I eating lunch today!”

More than halfway through Alex’s class, the smell intensified. It seemed those fish were taunting us, curling their oily charred edges in our direction. When Alex raised his hand, a student named Justine was reading aloud. Bad timing. I had just caught her fiddling with what looked like a fuzzy hybrid mouse-snake attached to a key chain. So when Alex signaled me, I returned my wait-a-minute signal.

Instead Alex scraped his chair back. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to the nurse! I have to. I’m allergic to fish!”

Mutters from the back row, “Yeah, right.”

I was losing time. I wanted to present essay topics by the next week. There was shuffling, fuzzy movement in my periphery.

“No, really!” Alex objected, though I hadn’t opened my mouth. “I feel like I can’t breathe. I need my medicine!”

Then he was in front of my desk, and I pulled out the permission pad from the drawer. “Okay, but wait for a slip.” I kept my eyes on him as I bent over it to write.

“I need my medicine!”

His medicine. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I retracted. “No. Don’t. Don’t wait. Go! Go get it.”

He was gone.

Alex got his medicine. After class I checked on him, and he was fine, so I didn’t give it much thought until ten years later, when I read that cooking is a clinically proven means of releasing airborne allergens. Ten years later I carried Eden through the double doors of a hospital emergency room.

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