It was Sunday, and Senior Mia El-Kheddiwi was enjoying the last morning of the weekend at a car show on Daniel Island.

In the moment, it seemed like a negligible event.

It was just a bee sting, and it didn’t feel like anything concerning.

“Then and there, no issue, I was just like, ‘ow, that hurt,’” El-Kheddiwi said. “Later that night, I had like a red circle around my leg.”

Despite the red, the sting still seemed unimportant.

“Move on to the next day, this is when I’m getting ready for school, I noticed that my leg is literally, like, so swollen. I’m like, ‘I’ve never experienced that ever in my entire life,’” El-Kheddiwi said.

Now the sting had her and her family’s attention, but El-Kheddiwi decided to test it out.

“My parents were, like, ‘you need to go to the doctor,’ and I’m, like, ‘no, I’m fine,” El-Kheddiwi said. “So me being me, I was like, ‘I’m just going to go to school.’”

It was not long before the symptoms really started to present themselves.

“So I’m in my first block, and my leg is … itching, burning, swollen and … I’m like, this is not normal,” El-Kheddiwi said.

In this state, El-Kheddiwi could not leave it alone any longer.

“So I asked my teacher, and I was like, ‘is it okay if I go to the nurse? Because I don’t think this is good,’” El-Kheddiwi said. “So then I walked over to the nurse’s office, and then they were just like, ‘yeah, that’s not normal.’”

There are multiple nurses assigned to Wando, but the East Cooper Center for Advanced Studies (ECCAS) only has one, who rotates to Carolina Park if the elementary school is missing a nurse. This was the reason El-Kheddiwi could not receive medical attention at the ECCAS on this particular day. El-Kheddiwi contacted her dad after arriving at the nurse’s office and went to the doctor’s office, where she learned that she was having a dangerous reaction to an allergen, leading to her receiving various medications.

“They ended up giving me a steroid shot,” El-Kheddiwi said. “Then I got put on antibiotics … within literally a day, it was back to normal.”

While she made a quick recovery, El-Kheddiwi’s everyday life looks a little different with this new allergy.

“I was never … allergic or anything to bees or anything like that,” El-Kheddiwi said. “You get more allergic, the more times you get stung. So they told me … ‘you need to start carrying an EpiPen around’ … because if I get stung again, it could be an even worse reaction.”

The school nurse’s office is also allowed to use its EpiPens if it is needed to protect the life of a student. Sharon Eads, one of Wando’s four designated nurses, is familiar with the policy surrounding treating allergic reactions on campus.

“There’s a doctor over in Charleston County that writes orders for us to be able to give things like epinephrine (EpiPen), ibuprofen, Tylenol … That’s one of our orders … that we can give epinephrine [to people having] an anaphylaxis, [there is] one in each of our emergency bags,” Eads said.

Outside of the EpiPen, a new mental change has emerged for El-Kheddiwi post-sting.

“I used to not be afraid of bees at all. Like, at all, at all,” El-Kheddiwi said. “But now, when I see a bee, I’m like, ‘please get away from me.’ Like, I do not care for bees anymore.”