A year of school dinners (a year of hell)

Apologies for my absence, which was longer than I intended, the pressures of third year are starting to hit me now…

Anyway, I’ve wanted to talk about my experiences of school in relation to my diet for a long time now because obviously it was a large part of my life, but this was where I always felt the most pressure to fit in. I particularly felt this in secondary school. I think most teenagers probably feel the need to fit in in some way or another at school, but I felt as if I had it slightly harder because I had this ‘thing’ that nobody really knew about and I just felt excluded. One main aspect of school which I found tough were dinner times, they became really quite stressful for me. Up until my first year of secondary school I had always taken packed lunch to prevent me from feeling too anxious, but by this time I had gotten a bit tired of eating sandwiches every day and I thought if I could have dinners like the rest of my friends perhaps I would feel more comfortable and ‘normal’ I guess.

My mum and I had a meeting with the school cooks and I felt reassured because surprisingly they had dealt with another PKU student before me and so they weren’t completely new to it all. My mum gave them instructions on how many exchanges I was allowed for each meal etc and they were happy to go ahead with it. I was happy too because I thought I would finally feel ‘normal’, but I quickly began to dread dinner times even more than before…

The first reason for this being that - I received a dinner pass which enabled me to jump the queue of people waiting to enter the dinner hall. This would’ve been all well and good, but anyone who knows me will know how shy I can be and the thought of me jumping a large queue of impatient students (even if I did have permission) actually mortified me. It was made all the more worse when students would sometimes shout at me asking ‘why was I allowed to push in front?’.Then, when I actually got into the dinner hall I had to jump yet another long line of people who were waiting to be served their food so that I could awkwardly stand in a corner and wait for the cooks to bring me my meal. Honestly this was bad enough for me.

Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse and I hoped maybe it would be worth all the hassle of queue jumping, they would bring out my meal and I would be astonished every time. To put into perspective, not only did every other student receive their meal in a polystyrene tray but it would actually be a normal sized portion of food – my meal however, was the complete opposite to this. I would receive mine on a plate and you could bet pretty much every time there would be a massive amount of food. I’m not kidding, my dinners probably could’ve fed at least three people. I reckon there’s something comical about seeing a young girl (who isn’t really overweight) walk out with a mountain of food on her plate and a couple of desserts on top of that (which is what they would sometimes give me). But I was just so embarrassed and even writing this now it still horrifies me.

I had to try my best to eat these massive meals in about ten minutes tops, because my school only allowed a half an hour dinner break and by the time I’d waited and sat down this was the time remaining. It was so stressful for me because I never could finish a meal but I knew that I had to somehow because of my exchanges. On top of this, I also still had to take my supplement at dinner times which would sometimes attract unwanted attention. I am the sort of person who much prefers to blend into the crowd, and I thought that by having school dinners it would help me to do so. But it had the complete opposite effect. I never really was a fan of secondary school anyway but I began to feel so anxious about dinner times that it just made it all so much worse for me and I think due to this, first year was one of the worst years ever.

I sound as if I’m criticising the cooks at my school, which isn’t what I intended because at the end of the day I’m sure they were just trying their best. And I’m not saying that everyone with PKU will necessarily have a bad experience of school dinners because who knows it might work out well for you? Maybe you’re already on dinners and have a good system going? I guess it comes down to preference. But personally, I realised it’s sometimes better to stick to what you know. When year seven was over I went back onto packed lunch and that’s how I remained for the rest of my time at school and dinner times became somewhat less of a stress again.