no complacency before bureaucracy

The competence of Sweden lulls you into compacency sometimes.  For even when Swedes are flat out incompetent, especially in the bureaucracy, they project this quiet, matter of fact rightness about everything, like they hear you but you are just wrong.  Poor you, though they would never say poor you, just think it in their rightness.

Then the daycare staff gives your milk allergic daughter milk, and you snap out of it and realize that you have to do everything yourself, take nothing for granted (such as the competence of a daycare administration), as if your kid were suddenly in the worst school in the worst school district in, say, rural North Korea (where they probably would not give my daughter milk at daycare, so I apologize dutiful rural North Korean daycare teachers).

So while we hear that the administrators are putting together reports on what happened (but never get a report), E took it upon herself to call all the bosses involved and find out what they have done (barely enough).  And she took it upon herself to march up to the daycare and give the teachers practially one-on-one tutorials on milk allergies, what to do in the event of an anaphylatic shock, and how to use an EpiPen, which our daughter did not have but now does because they fed her cow milk.

So last Tuesday or Wednesday, we started letting NK eat at daycare again.  And all is well.  There is a specific teacher assigned to sit with her, and her seat is clearly marked out.  NK got a little sad when the teachers stopped letting her pour her own milk at snack time (she never pours the wrong milk, they poured the wrong milk) but they found a compromise.

Now we have to balance our desire to educate and move on with the righteous drive to find out what the hell happened and why, and report all of it to whoever we need to report it to and hope those people don’t just sit silently and think, Poor you.

milk allergy vs. lactose intolerance

A milk allergy is not lactose intolerance.  This is confusing, which is fine for the average person, but not fine for my daughter’s daycare, where they posted a note saying she was lactose intolerant, gave her lactose-free milk and put her in the hospital last week.

Put simply, a milk allergy is an immune system problem, and lactose intolerance is a digestive problem.   The milk allergy is much more serious, affects 2-4 percent of all infants, with potentially severe consequences.  It means avoiding all milk proteins, even small amounts of stuff like “casein” that gets dropped into the most random products.   It definitely means avoiding lactose-free products.  Lactose has nothing to do with milk protein.

Most of the kids outgrow the allergy, though I have been finding some articles that say it happens later than first thought.

So I should not be worried that she still has the allergy at the age of three.  But I should be worried that it could last until she is 16.

I happen to be lactose intolerant, mildly.  This means I can eat dairy but might pay the price later of a stomach ache.  It comes in handy now because Daddy also does not eat cheese, which NK really likes.  “Only Mamma!”

In the United States, there was a new labeling law passed in 2006, which requires all possible allergens to be listed in bold.  This is great.  They do not do this in Sweden yet so I have had to learn all the sneaky Swedish names for milk protein.  And Swedes love their milk protein, putting it seemingly into twice as many foods as the US.  On the flip side, the allergy care we get here is 20 times better than what we got in the US.

the cover up is almost always worse than the crime

We are still reeling from a glass of milk that our daughter drank at her daycare.  She is back to normal, that happened the next day.   She says she is mad, but she was also happy to go this morning, her first since last Thursday.

But her parents are not so calm and cool.  We remain in a swirl of meetings and revelations about how our milk allergic daughter got milk, why no one called an ambulance and why they still can’t tell us what happened.

Oh, and we learned that she also drank milk last year.  But no one told us.  Even after she coughed until she threw up.

The daycare administration is earnestly sorry, and assures us over and over, that it will not happen again.

Then, after a 90 minute meeting, this morning we walk into the dining room, and there is a note on the wall listing the dietary restrictions of all the children.

NK – No egg, no soy, no lactose.

What!?!?  Lactose intolerance is not the same as milk allergy.  This note is why they claim “everyone knew” about NK’s allergy, even though they never had a meeting, never passed on anything from her teachers last year (who apparently covered up the other glass of milk, anyway).  And this note is why someone poured her lactose free milk and told her to drink it.

Fine.  Huge mistake.  We can accept that.

But what is it still doing on the wall five days later?  They claim all this extensive work has been done, and they do not read the damn note on the wall?

And so we are left in a bad spot.  NK loves daycare, there are no kids her age not in daycare in Stockholm, and this daycare has a wonderful chef on site who cooks our allergic daughter great food.  Most of the private daycares seem to get food shipped in from caterers, and that will not work for us.

Plus we have the misfortune of living in the Stockholm area during a baby boom.  You just don’t get a new spot in the daycare of your choice in Solna (we tried to get in a parent cooperative, but no space).  And who is to say that another municipal daycare will be better?  Why should we trust anything the city of Solna does?

How far do we take this?   To the police?  To the politicians?  To the newspapers?

And how do we rebuild our trust at the same time?  Because it is likely NK will have to go to this daycare at least for the fall, and we can not transmit fear and anger to her.

a drink of milk, a trip to the emergency room

Our daughter ended up in the emergency room yesterday … because she drank half a glass of milk.  See, she has severe milk and egg allergies.  They shape her daily life – what she eats, what she can not eat, what we eat that she can not eat, and so on.  I never write about it because it has become so normal, so safe.

More than safe, it seemed boring.  What do you say?  We took it so seriously that NK never even got near milk before she started daycare.  Sweden is an allergy hotbed, and NK goes (for free) to a special allergy doctor (even in our socialized medical system!).

The milk allergy was tough when we moved from America because Swedes love their milk, really love it, dump it in almost everything.  Now the egg allergy is harder because you don’t know what they put into food in restaurants and there are not great egg replacements here, one area where Sweden really lags behind America.  We love the restaurants that give you ingredient lists – the fast food ones are the best, actually – and curse places that do not serve one single thing she can eat.

But her allergies are not boring anymore.  Not now.  Not now that we have seen what happens when she drinks a lot of milk (she only got drops before), the wheezing and swelling and shock and crying.  The doctors fixed her right up, nothing like a huge shot of cortisone to knock down swelling and jump start her into a hyper run around the examination room.

For a hot, panicked hour yesterday, as I half-ran to the hospital, carrying her little brother in a sling and pushing a stroller, I knew that she drank milk, and E and the doctors did not.  And my phone was dead.  Now, I knew they knew that this was an allergic reaction.  I knew the doctors were good.  But still, I was helpless and hot and lost on a big road in ugly industrial Sweden, and, well, the imagination gets vivid right then, and not in a good way.

And now we feel less safe, a little scared.  We will make changes, demand changes from others.  We will evaluate many things,  trying to make her safe but not panic her.

midsummer – then and now

We decided to stay in town this Midsummer, perhaps the most Swedish of days, what with rain to the north at the new summer house and no invitations to speak of this year.

So on the most Swedish of days, when we celebrate the sun and dance around the Midsummer pole and are supposed to eat lots of potatoes and herring and drink schnapps by the midnight sun, this was our day.

Hotel breakfast at the mall. Long aimless walk through our neighborhood. Lunch at Max, Sweden’s answer to In-N-Out Burger. Strawberries and oat ice cream with soy whipped cream (NK is allergic to milk and egg). Bedtime as the cool rain begins to fall.

But we’ve done Midsummer right. On my first Midsummer in Sweden, five years ago, I had about the most traditional holiday possible.

And, luckily, I already wrote about it for the Boston Globe in 2005.

Here are the first couple paragraphs.

HUDIKSVALL, Sweden — Summer in Sweden should be a kaleidoscope of colors in a bewitching northern light. Last summer, however, was a succession of damp, gray days, save for the green grass in the fields and meadows.
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So on June 25, with intermittent fog obscuring the countryside, a group composed mostly of Swedes drove up the Baltic coast, the car full of home-baked breads and potato dishes with names like Jansson’s Temptation. They waited on a lonely dock outside this town, about 160 miles north of Stockholm. It was almost 10 p.m., though the overcast sky remained light, when two small boats glided out of the sea mist.

Lars-Ake Asell, 58, a financial controller from Gävle, a city about halfway between Stockholm and Hudiksvall, greeted the group from one of the boats and helped load their backpacks for the journey to the island of Olmen.

After easing through almost 2 miles of calm seas, the boats entered a cove ringed by a cluster of small red cottages with white trim. The Swedes marveled at the authenticity of the cottages, a return to the 1950s, with musty wool blankets, sturdy wooden furniture, no electricty, and a portrait of the king in the outhouse.

This is a perfect place for Midsummer’s Eve, they said.

Now if only the sun would shine. The next morning, for the first time seemingly in weeks, it did.

From beyond the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of their long country, Swedes flee their cities on Midsummer’s Eve to celebrate the longest days of the year, the return of the sun after its winter death. They gather around maypoles to dance and sing, to feast with family and friends, and to pick wildflowers and dream of love.

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