"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."

"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."

~Mohandas K Gandhi

Monday, September 5, 2011

New school year

The beginning of a new school year brings trepidation to not only students, but staff as well.  (I say "staff" and not "teachers" because, well, I am not a teacher.)  What students will I have this year?  What classes?  Will I be working with teachers I like and respect?  Will I have a hard time understanding the subject matter?  Will the teacher like and respect me?  Will the teachers think I'm an idiot if I ask questions about what they're teaching?

I have additional concerns when a new school year begins.  I've been healthy all summer, even on vacation, when I got very little sleep.  How long will it be before I get my first illness of the school year?  When will the first time I have to call in sick be?  Maybe this will be the year I make it to Christmas without calling in sick once!  (Yeah, right.  Actually, this did happen one year.  One, out of 17.)  What knds of infections will the kids bring back from their various travels?  Please, God, let them not have travelled anywhere that had a measles or mumps epidemic and be unvaccinated, or I am SCREWED!

One year, we got a memo from the nurse that a student had Fifth's Disease and if you were pregnant to please see her.  I freaked out, since I had never heard of Fifth's Disease, and went to see her.  No, I wasn't pregnant at the time, but as someone who is immunocompromised, any mention of out-of-the-ordinary infections freak me out.  Fifth's Disease, as it turns out, is no big deal, generally, but if a pregnant woman gets it, it can lead to birth defects.  Awesome.

So, here I am, 12 hours away from a new school year.  My son enters kindergarten this year.  He'll be at the same place he's always gone to daycare, so it's not going to be that huge a change for him.  I, however, will be in three different schools this year- the high school, middle school, and the vo-tech school.  Three schools, three different places to pick up infections. 

These are the things that go through your mind before a new school year begins, and you have a Primary Imuune Deficiency.

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