Food-allergic kids long to have normal days

With the impending arrival of school comes numerous rituals: back-to-school shopping and well-child exams, with perhaps a few vaccinations thrown in, and maybe a last series of family day trips while the weather is still warm.

For nearly 85,000 food-allergic New Jersey students and their families, the routine also includes the filling of epinephrine prescriptions and the creation of emergency action plans, the medicine and step-by-step instructions to save a child's life from a severe allergic reaction while at school or at schoolsponsored functions.

Some of these children and their families will be walking Sept. 7 at the Walk for Food Allergy: Moving Toward a Cure, in Long Branch. The walk raises money for the Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network, which raises awareness and funds for food allergy education and research toward a cure.

We parents of food-allergic children do a delicate dance — although sometimes it's more like lumbering — back and forth between normalcy and hypervigilance, trying desperately to keep our offspring from joining the statistics: one of the 150 to 200 deaths a year in the U.S., or one of 30,000 emergency room visits.

Food allergies are a chronic, incurable physical and social illness that no one can see until the immune system rises up and bites. Living with this almostinvisible condition is a little bit like living in a parallel universe. We inhabit the same schools, the same playgrounds, the same neighborhoods as everyone else, and on the outside, everyone seems healthy, at least until an ordinary day ends in the back of an ambulance headed toward an emergency room.

When we gather in Long Branch as well as in 25 other cities this fall, we are hoping that some day our ordinary days can be like most people's when they gather around food, whether it be for sustenance or social occasions, a holiday dinner with relatives, ice cream on a summer vacation, a birthday party with little friends. An ordinary day where your 5-year-old doesn't ask if the food will make him sick, or if he will need a shot.

Visit www.foodallergywalk. org/longbranch_nj to learn more about the walk and to find out how you can help.

Allison Inserro

Metuchen

Allergy & Asthma Support Group of Central New Jersey

www.allergyfriendsnj.org