The greyish green double doors opened, spewing a sea of screaming first and second graders ready for the sun and the grassy field. In the midst of them, a little girl passed me by, her focus was toward the swings, slides and monkey bars. But beneath such focus, something tugged me. Rimming the little girl’s eyes were suppressed tears and as she shuffled in the direction of the bark laden playgound, a soft moan came out of her.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
The girl halted her pace, tilting her head up to look at me. “Huh?” she asked back, sadness in her eyes.
“What’s the matter sweetie? Are you alright?”
“No,” she answered in her sweet, soft, tiny voice, and began to tell me what was bothering her. She pointed at her thigh. In her lisped speech, she told me that she has a sore or a boil on her leg. “And it hurts (pronouncing her R’s with W’s) really, really bad,” she added.
The girl wanted to show me the sore, pulling the hem of her jean pant up, but the wound was too high up to be seen. I stopped her, telling her that it’s okay, and that I don’t need to see it.
“Have you told your Mom or Dad about it,” concerned that this girl should bear such pain.
“Yes,” she replied. “I already told my mom. But she said that we don’t have the money to take me to the doctor.”
Why would an innocent child be made to sacrifice her well-being and health?
It angers me when I see a child in pain, his or her parent scraping by to make ends meet and I hear multi-billion banks being bailed out. All these occuring because of greed and their stupid mistakes. It angers me when I learn that the new CEO of WAMU, who only was in office for three weeks gets 11.7 million for running the company and hundreds of thousands of dollars in severance pay. Yet, an eight year old child is made to sit in a corner wondering if she can go to a doctor to get her leg sore checked.
It breaks my heart to look into this child’s blue eyes and feel helpless about it. That moment, I wanted to take her to the doctor myself and hope that our insurance would cover the expenses. But we all know that that’s highly unlikely. The only option I had was to send the girl to the nurse’s office so that her sore could be checked. (Maybe the nurse could take notes and what not…I don’t know).
When the girl left, deep inside, I knew nothing will be done to it (the sore) because schools are not allowed to treat or dispense anything unless given the authorization by a doctor to do so.
