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>> OK. I can understand that as a high schooler, she wasn’t supposed to be on the elementary school bus in the first place but she claimed she fell ill on the way to school and was catching a ride back so she could get home. <<

Once she gets on the bus, she is the responsibility of the school. No need to call in; once she’s on the bus, she’s getting to the school. What bus driver in their right mind would say, “You’re feeling sick so suddenly? Why, sure, I’ll drop you off, alone, away from both home and school!”

She must have gotten to school grounds. And I never would have thought of arriving at the school, and then leaving without checking in with the nurse.

And I never would have thought of arriving at the school, and then leaving without checking in with the nurse.

By the time I was in High School, I had already figured out that the “school nurse” was pretty much useless.

I remember getting up one morning in my junior year of high school and feeling perfectly fine but on my way to school I started feeling kind of queasy and not so good overall.

By the time I got to school I was feeling worse but I went to home room and my first period class and then started feeling really bad and asked to go the nurse’s office.

All she did was take my temperature and I was running a low grade fever and additionally was pale, sweaty, clammy and complaining of nausea and dizziness, feeling achy and chilled.

But she had me sit in a chair next to her desk to see if “it would pass” before deciding whether to send me back to class or to call my mother.

I sat in that uncomfortable chair for more than an hour while I was feeling worse and worse and having to answering her stupid and insulting questions like “Are you having your period? And “Are you sexually active? Could you be pregnant”?

I answered honestly, “No I am not having my period.” And “No, I’ve never had sex so it would be pretty much impossible for me to be pregnant but if you keep me sitting in this chair much longer, it’s very likely I will puke all over your desk.”

She did finally call my mother who gave her permission to send me home. But my mother didn’t drive and my father worked in construction and this being long before the days of cell phones, he was unreachable and, living in the city and attending a magnet school on the other side of town, we didn’t have school busses but had to ride public mass transit busses.

So with an official “permission slip” in hand, I stood on a cold street corner for over 20 minutes waiting for the next MTA buss that would take me downtown where I got off and waited for another 20 minutes for another MTA bus that would take me to a bus stop where I had a twelve block walk home. The whole trip took about 1 ½ hours.

I honestly don’t know how I made it home but by the time I got home I was running a very high fever and had a massive headache, chills and body aches like I’ve never had and violently vomiting. I spend the next four days in bed and have never been so sick in my life.

It turned out that I had come down with the “Russian Flu”, a partially nasty strain of flu going around that year. Half of the students and teachers came down with it the same week I did and nearly the other half did the next week and some schools ended up shutting down.

If I had to do it all over again I would have skipped the visit to the nurse’s office and just gone home.