I was just baffled to read that he was 17, I mean come on he's clearly not a child.
But, legally, he is a child because he's not 18.
The guy's seventeen. I doubt he would have screwed up using it, or used it to get high. I never did that with my insulin at school, and they let me carry that around with me at school since I was like 14. Damn the proper procedure, she should have given it to him.
It's not about whether this kid is responsible with his inhaler or not. As stated before, this generation of kids is EXTREMELY DUMB with the type of things they're getting high on. The basic form of monitoring what drugs are entering the schools is this medical release form. And no, she shouldn't have given it to him because that then nullifies the entire point of the release form, thus no one will sign it because when the time comes, the nurse will just give it to you anyway.
Also, the article says that the administrators found the inhaler in his locker and took it from him. Don't you think that maybe they should have, at that point, contacted the parents to tell them they needed the permission slip? It's certainly not unreasonable for the parents to have assumed their son's paperwork was still on file from all the previous years he had dealt with this.
Right, they found it, I'm assuming last week, having not been used yet. And there is nothing in the article that states the administrators DIDN'T contact the mother. Just like it doesn't say the mother assumed the paperwork was valid from the last three years.
Oh wait, it does. It is absolutely unreasonable for the parents to have assumed the paperwork was still on file
if they had to sign one each year.
Look, bottom line here is that the nurse stood by and let the boy ultimately pass out from his asthma attack. All over a piece of paper. Would she have also let him die over that piece of paper?
It doesn't say he had completely passed out. It says that the mother walked in as the kid started to collapse against the wall.
As I've said before, I know how bad asthma can be, but I also know how infrequent and relatively easy to pass through it can be. If the kid hasn't even opened the damned inhaler, is the nurse,
who likely has been doing this longer than the kid has been alive, wrong to assume he'd be able to pass through it? She's a medically trained professional, just like those doctors who will make you wait 30 min to 4 hours (in the case of my girlfriend in a West Philly hospital) just to be examined.
To me, the most likely of scenarios is that she made a judgment call that the attack would pass if she kept the kid calm and breathing because she doesn't have the right to give him the medication. She closed the door for patient privacy. But things started to take a slide, but not to the point of asphyxiation, so that's when they contacted the mother when it took time to locate the inhaler. It seems to say the mother got there in the nick of time as the kid fell to floor.
The nurse did her job, and should not be reprimanded for it. But she will likely be ousted due to backlash over this incident from the parents who refuse to think rationally.
The real contention with this article is the rush-job writing. There's no clear indication of stream of events. The kid and mother says she was in a locked door with no indication of how the mother was contacted. Obviously, the nurse HAD to call someone, who then made a decision to call the mother over 911. And again, there's no indication of what happened when the school took the packaged inhaler. More importantly, no one bothered to ask why the slip wasn't signed in May of the kid's 4th year. Lousy reporting only backed by the mother and son hamming it. That animal on the side of the road comment has invalidated any claim she has.
