Midsummer it's hard to find time to post. We're taking two weeklong family vacations not so far apart and with planning and packing and then getting swamped with work when you get back there's not much time to write.
Two aspects of traveling are relevant to this blog: how to take your eczema pharmacy along with you, and how to handle your kid's food allergies.
Last Saturday we got back from a trip to a family camp in the Sierra Nevada. It was awesome. I didn't think about work for a whole week and was so stress-free that I could jump in the pool whenever I felt like it and strut around in just my bathing suit. You've got to enjoy these times when you have them.
We ate in the camp mess hall. The staff were great about telling us what the ingredients were in all the food. Often they could give us a special dish without nuts or dairy, which are the two things my daughter's allergic to. But of course, she's a picky eater, and you can never tell what she's going to go for.
When we got back, I read about a tragic incident at a summer camp near Sacramento where a 13-year-old girl died after one bite of a Rice Krispies square containing peanuts. My daughter doesn't have an anaphylactic reaction to anything--not yet--but this was a sober reminder of how deadly nut allergies can be.
Our next trip starts on Wednesday when we fly to Nova Scotia for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. We often go to NS in August and last year, coming back, we spent an extra day in Newark airport thanks to United Airlines, which we are NEVER FLYING AGAIN. I had run out of any moisturizer or steroid, which was my fault--but try finding fragrance-free moisturizer in the airport shops. Not going to happen. By the time we got home, my eczema was out of control and took several days to cool down to a point where I could appear in public.
Also, being out of food and having a kid with allergies in an airport was a different kind of nightmare. You can't find an ingredient list anywhere and everything seems to have nuts or dairy or whatever. My daughter was essentially reduced to eating potato chips for the better part of 24 hours, but we did gamble on getting her noodles from a random Asian restaurant. Just glad, now that I know she's allergic to sesame, that Asian restaurants in airports are far from authentic.
So this year? I'm going to bring too much moisturizer. And we're going to pack a day's worth of safe food for my daughter.
Hopefully we won't need it--we're flying Air Canada.
Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label air travel. Show all posts
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Airport eczema hell
Nobody likes flying these days. The bag fees, the lines, the security, the delays. But flying is a special hell for those of us with eczema. Each of us has his or her personal pharmacy at home, containing moisturizers, various grades of steroids, and special soaps, shampoos, and shaving creams that cost a lot of money and are difficult to find in stores. When you travel, first of all you have to select what to take with you. Airlines lose bags, so you want to put your vitals in your carryon—but regulations now say that everything has to fit into a quart-size Ziploc, so you have to fill small plastic containers with a few days’ worth of this or that. And if you’re not careful—as happened to me recently—a zealous airline employee can “gate-check” your carryon because the plane’s already full of other passengers’ necessities. You last see your precious mini-pharmacy sitting forlornly on the jet way as you board Untied Airlines 1234 for Topeka.
Untied Airlines. (I don’t want to embarrass the airline, so I’ve given them a pseudonym.)
I’ll never fly Untied again. They made my trip back from my summer family vacation a personal indignity. The worst thing is that it wasn’t the Untied staff, who were almost all truly helpful and pleasant. It was the airline’s system, which was clearly to blame for all the problems. So no free vouchers or drinks will convince me to fly with them again, because the experience would surely be no better next time.
Our trips out and back were two-stage: San Francisco to Chicago to Halifax, and Halifax to Newark to San Francisco. On the way out, both flights were delayed by two hours—but the delays were of the rolling variety, in which the airline tells you the plane’s going to take off in half an hour, but it doesn’t; then they announce it will take off in another half hour, but it doesn’t; etc.
But these delays were peanuts. The real trouble started on the second leg of our return, as you will see.
My mistake was in bringing along on the trip only just enough moisturizers and steroids to last the planned duration. Because the vacation was stressful (my extended family, ten of us, in a small house for two weeks) and heavily air-conditioned, my skin had been especially dry and inflamed—so much so that my dad assumed the redness was sunburn. I ran out of Eucerin two days before our return, and bought a cheap substitute that didn’t really do the job. I squeezed the last microgram of steroids out of a flattened tube, and willed myself not to scratch. You can imagine how that worked out.
I packed my pathetic remaining moisturizer into a small Tupperware container and shoved it into my carryon. As we left Halifax for San Francisco, where my eczema stash awaited, I felt like a nomad in the desert making his way back to a beloved oasis.
We barely made a tight connection in Newark. An Untied employee gate-checked my bag, and I watched my moisturizer disappear into the distance. Untied gave us seats in four different locations throughout the plane, so we had to beg random strangers to let us sit next to our kids. It was 2:00 in the afternoon.
Two hours pass on the tarmac. Then the pilot tells us the flight has been canceled because of mechanical difficulties.
We disembark in confusion. Eventually we get booked on a flight leaving at 8:00 pm. We get food vouchers and search the airport for something that my daughter, who has dairy and nut allergies, can eat. We find essentially nothing. (She doesn’t have known anaphylactic problems, but who wants to gamble?) She's eaten all her snacks already. This is going to be a hungry day for her. We board at 8:00 and, because we have seats in four different locations, beg random strangers to take our cramped middle seats so that we can sit next to our kids.
Three hours pass on the tarmac. The kids fall asleep. Then the pilot tells us the flight has been canceled because of mechanical difficulties.
Someone in the back of the plane yells “Goddamn!”
We all get free drink vouchers and coupons for 10% off our next flight on Untied.
And we get to stay overnight at the Newark Ramada. “Overnight” in this case means four hours, since it’s now midnight and we have to be back at the airport to go through security again for our new 7:00 am flight.
By the morning, my skin is so dry it makes the Dead Sea Scrolls look supple. I introduce myself to my seatmate, but can’t shake hands with her because it would be too painful and disgusting. I look at myself in the mirror of the airplane bathroom. My face is falling off.
Eighteen hours after we were supposed to arrive, we land in San Francisco. The final farce: our bags aren’t on the plane and we have to go searching for them. My wife finds them in a special long-term holding location.
The first thing I do at home is to take a long shower with Dove soap and tar shampoo and cover myself in a thick layer of Eucerin. The second thing: rip all the Untied tags off our baggage.
The moral to this story, I guess, is that you have to plan for the worst when you fly. And I will next time. You have to go into survival mode, and make absolutely sure that you have small containers of your eczema essentials on your person where you can’t possibly lose them. Otherwise, you run the risk of a hellish experience.
Untied Airlines. (I don’t want to embarrass the airline, so I’ve given them a pseudonym.)
I’ll never fly Untied again. They made my trip back from my summer family vacation a personal indignity. The worst thing is that it wasn’t the Untied staff, who were almost all truly helpful and pleasant. It was the airline’s system, which was clearly to blame for all the problems. So no free vouchers or drinks will convince me to fly with them again, because the experience would surely be no better next time.
Our trips out and back were two-stage: San Francisco to Chicago to Halifax, and Halifax to Newark to San Francisco. On the way out, both flights were delayed by two hours—but the delays were of the rolling variety, in which the airline tells you the plane’s going to take off in half an hour, but it doesn’t; then they announce it will take off in another half hour, but it doesn’t; etc.
But these delays were peanuts. The real trouble started on the second leg of our return, as you will see.
My mistake was in bringing along on the trip only just enough moisturizers and steroids to last the planned duration. Because the vacation was stressful (my extended family, ten of us, in a small house for two weeks) and heavily air-conditioned, my skin had been especially dry and inflamed—so much so that my dad assumed the redness was sunburn. I ran out of Eucerin two days before our return, and bought a cheap substitute that didn’t really do the job. I squeezed the last microgram of steroids out of a flattened tube, and willed myself not to scratch. You can imagine how that worked out.
I packed my pathetic remaining moisturizer into a small Tupperware container and shoved it into my carryon. As we left Halifax for San Francisco, where my eczema stash awaited, I felt like a nomad in the desert making his way back to a beloved oasis.
We barely made a tight connection in Newark. An Untied employee gate-checked my bag, and I watched my moisturizer disappear into the distance. Untied gave us seats in four different locations throughout the plane, so we had to beg random strangers to let us sit next to our kids. It was 2:00 in the afternoon.
Two hours pass on the tarmac. Then the pilot tells us the flight has been canceled because of mechanical difficulties.
We disembark in confusion. Eventually we get booked on a flight leaving at 8:00 pm. We get food vouchers and search the airport for something that my daughter, who has dairy and nut allergies, can eat. We find essentially nothing. (She doesn’t have known anaphylactic problems, but who wants to gamble?) She's eaten all her snacks already. This is going to be a hungry day for her. We board at 8:00 and, because we have seats in four different locations, beg random strangers to take our cramped middle seats so that we can sit next to our kids.
Three hours pass on the tarmac. The kids fall asleep. Then the pilot tells us the flight has been canceled because of mechanical difficulties.
Someone in the back of the plane yells “Goddamn!”
We all get free drink vouchers and coupons for 10% off our next flight on Untied.
And we get to stay overnight at the Newark Ramada. “Overnight” in this case means four hours, since it’s now midnight and we have to be back at the airport to go through security again for our new 7:00 am flight.
By the morning, my skin is so dry it makes the Dead Sea Scrolls look supple. I introduce myself to my seatmate, but can’t shake hands with her because it would be too painful and disgusting. I look at myself in the mirror of the airplane bathroom. My face is falling off.
Eighteen hours after we were supposed to arrive, we land in San Francisco. The final farce: our bags aren’t on the plane and we have to go searching for them. My wife finds them in a special long-term holding location.
The first thing I do at home is to take a long shower with Dove soap and tar shampoo and cover myself in a thick layer of Eucerin. The second thing: rip all the Untied tags off our baggage.
The moral to this story, I guess, is that you have to plan for the worst when you fly. And I will next time. You have to go into survival mode, and make absolutely sure that you have small containers of your eczema essentials on your person where you can’t possibly lose them. Otherwise, you run the risk of a hellish experience.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
A shared resource for immunotherapy
I'm off tomorrow to New Haven for the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers. A junket that will see me absent at the kids' bedtime not once, but twice, as Hidden B pointed out, using this as a cudgel to get me to change a particularly stinky diaper. So the blog will resume on Monday.
I'm pressed for time tonight, too. Have to go get some cash, pick up an organics CSA box that is contending for the status of all-time most inconvenient birthday present, make dinner, and pack. Flying into the fair city of Hartford, departing Oakland at 07:35. You may recall an earlier post in which I awarded a Mark Twain Steel Trap Award to the gentlemen responsible for the FAA's no-moisturizer-in-carryons law. Messrs. Ali, Sarwar, et al. were on my mind the other day as I purchased a small, but filthy expensive, tube of Eucerin that will see me through the next two-and-a-half days.
The eczema news of the day is a little tangential. A few posts ago, I wrote about sublingual immunotherapy. The idea in this technique is that if your eczema arises predominantly from an allergy to one thing, you try to induce your immune system to become tolerant to that thing, thereby reducing your eczema symptoms. In the past, immunotherapy doctors have injected allergens. Now, for the wimpy, there is the (slightly less effective) droplet-under-the-tongue, or "sublingual," technique. The doctor gives you a small bottle of drops and you take one or a few a day; the allergens get taken up by dendritic cells in your mucosal linings, and presented to T cells, and thus (the hope is), your body learns that the allergen is no big deal and shouldn't induce an eczema reaction.
For scientists in the realm of immunotherapy research--the study of techniques to induce tolerance in autoimmune and allergic diseases--there is now a new resource at the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF's BioShare, a bank of over 100,000 specimens from a ten-year federal project to catalog biomarkers of various diseases, is now offering its samples openly to qualified researchers. The samples were taken from patients with thoroughly diagnosed conditions, at well-defined points in the progression of the diseases. So now you can analyze the samples to see how much of this or that protein or hormone or whatever the body is producing at each point-- and how the body alters its output when immunotherapy is given. It's a way to measure whether the immunotherapy is working or not.
Have a good weekend.
I'm pressed for time tonight, too. Have to go get some cash, pick up an organics CSA box that is contending for the status of all-time most inconvenient birthday present, make dinner, and pack. Flying into the fair city of Hartford, departing Oakland at 07:35. You may recall an earlier post in which I awarded a Mark Twain Steel Trap Award to the gentlemen responsible for the FAA's no-moisturizer-in-carryons law. Messrs. Ali, Sarwar, et al. were on my mind the other day as I purchased a small, but filthy expensive, tube of Eucerin that will see me through the next two-and-a-half days.
The eczema news of the day is a little tangential. A few posts ago, I wrote about sublingual immunotherapy. The idea in this technique is that if your eczema arises predominantly from an allergy to one thing, you try to induce your immune system to become tolerant to that thing, thereby reducing your eczema symptoms. In the past, immunotherapy doctors have injected allergens. Now, for the wimpy, there is the (slightly less effective) droplet-under-the-tongue, or "sublingual," technique. The doctor gives you a small bottle of drops and you take one or a few a day; the allergens get taken up by dendritic cells in your mucosal linings, and presented to T cells, and thus (the hope is), your body learns that the allergen is no big deal and shouldn't induce an eczema reaction.
For scientists in the realm of immunotherapy research--the study of techniques to induce tolerance in autoimmune and allergic diseases--there is now a new resource at the University of California, San Francisco. UCSF's BioShare, a bank of over 100,000 specimens from a ten-year federal project to catalog biomarkers of various diseases, is now offering its samples openly to qualified researchers. The samples were taken from patients with thoroughly diagnosed conditions, at well-defined points in the progression of the diseases. So now you can analyze the samples to see how much of this or that protein or hormone or whatever the body is producing at each point-- and how the body alters its output when immunotherapy is given. It's a way to measure whether the immunotherapy is working or not.
Have a good weekend.
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