Tonight around 9pm I got a call message from Elder Crandall that his companion Elder Lopez ate some shrimp and that he is allergic to it. They said that it was about 45 minutes ago and that they gave him medicine and that he seemed fine. Then I started asking more questions and found out that he had had an previous anaphylactic reaction to shrimp before where he had needed to use an epi-pen. He did not have any epi-pens. At this point I was starting to panic because I knew that if you have had an anaphylactic reaction before, that the next time is usually worse. I told Elder Crandall that he needed to find someone to take him and Elder Lopez to the hospital right away. Luckily the bishop of the ward they are serving in had a car and he came quickly to pick the missionaries up. The ZL's decided that it would be best if Elder De La Cruz another Elder in the zone, went to the hospital with Elder Lopez. I looked online and the closest hospital was La Lima. It said it was open 24 hours. So they drove to the hospital. When they got there, it was closed (welcome to Honduras). By this time, Elder Lopez's throat was starting to swell shut and he was having difficulties breathing. The bishop knew of a clinic in Satelite that was open. While they were driving there, Elder Da La Cruz called me and was yelling in the phone, "he can't breathe, he can't breathe." Thankfully right about this time, they pulled up to the clinic in Satelite. And extra thankfully, they had epinephrine and were able to administer it to him on time. He was OK. That was so incredibly stressful. And poor Elder Da La Cruz. He was so stressed out that Elder Lopez was going to die right in front of his eyes. I made him a whole batch of brownies.
So Elder Lopez didn't put that he had an allergy to shrimp on his mission papers. If he had they would have never sent him to our mission because we don't have epi-pens available here. He did bring epi-pens when he came to the mission, 15 of them. But they got taken from him in the Panama airport. He had told President and Sister Ostler when he got here, but they probably didn't realize how serious it was, or it just got lost in the shuffle of all the million things that there are to do every day.
So in the middle of all the mess, I had messaged our mission doctor, Dr Snow, to see if he had any advice. Of course he didn't reply until the whole thing was over, but that didn't stop him from inserting himself in the situation. He messaged our IFR (infield representative) and told him about the situation. Our IFR told us that since Honduras doesn't have epi-pens available that we would have to transfer Elder Lopez to a mission that did have epi-pens. We begged and asked if we could just get some epi-pens from somewhere. He has been in our mission for 8 months now, but they said no and so we had to transfer Elder Lopez to the Chile Sanitago mission.
Going away party for Elder Lopez
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