At Mabels we have a couple of safety products that make a lot of sense. Our "Allergy Alerts" and "My 411 Wristbands" are a great way to notify folks that your kid has a medical condition or allergy. Clearly it brings piece of mind to mamas whose kids are going off into the world of people who just don't get how severe an allergy can be.
 

I think that a severe food allergy would pretty much make me psycho. Strangely, I'm quite laissez-faire when it comes to other ailments. This is particularly obvious when I'm deciding whether something warrants medical attention. Clearly, I can't run to the Doc for every runny nose or rash or I'd be doing nothing else. Fortunately I have a friend who has a TV medical degree - she has been a committed viewer of everything from St. Elsewhere to ER, and now Greys and House. As such, she's well qualified to field my first call and when she does not feel confident in her diagnosis, happily refers me on to a professional.

 

 

My TV Doctor friend must be doing a good job. A couple of years ago I was called by one of those professionals to bring a kiddo in for a check up. Turns out, the Doc had not met that kid, even though she had been on the books for three years. Because I don't immunize my kids, we seem to miss out on the early wellness check-ups so I generally have no clue about their growth rates or weights. While there is one kiddo who has an allergy to penicillin, I couldn't tell you for certain which one without checking my medical files. Oh, and there was that time my son walked around on a broken foot for three weeks......ah well, as my MIL would say, ya can't wrap them in cotton wool!

 

Some recent medical happenings with daddy-o got me thinking that maybe he's inappropriately applying this laissez-faire attitude to himself in all situations. Most recently, several Specialist appointments and a couple of biopsies later, he was going in for some results. I left him with strict instructions to phone me at the office to immediately report on the findings.

 

No phone call came and when I finally got a hold of him, the phone conversation went like this:

 

Me: "So what did the doc say about such and such.....pause......oh, you didn't ask that?"

Repeat that about five or six times. For every question, no answer.

 

I hung up in frustration and one of the Mabel mamas in the office shared some advice. First up, it's nothing short of foolish to let a daddy-o go to a specialist appointment alone. She relayed that with her husband's fair Irish skin, he has an appointment every year for an inspection of his ever-changing, growing, shrinking, appearing, disappearing moles and freckles. If she can't go to the appointment, she pulls out a pen and circles every mole she wants the Doc to look at with the simple instruction "tell the Doc to look for the ink!"