Kiss of death is something you associate with stories and cautionary tales, but not in real life. But as it turns out, truth is stranger than fiction: four years ago a Canadian woman died after kissing her boyfriend.
Now her mother is speaking out about her daughter’s truncated life.
In a Journal de Quebec article, Micheline Ducré says that the night her daughter Myriam Ducré-Lemay died could have been a normal night out for her had certain avoidable mistakes not been made.
It started out when Myriam went out to a party with her boyfriend, after which they went back to his place where he ate peanut butter sandwich, brushed his teeth, and kissed her—unbeknownst to him that she suffered from a serious nut allergy.
Myriam “didn’t feel it” at first, a detail Micheline finds odd because “usually, she feels [her allergies] from a hundred miles around.”
Minutes after the kiss, Myriam began to experience severe shortness of breath, a common symptom of an anaphylactic reaction.
“Despite her boyfriend calling 911 and an ambulance arriving just eight minutes later, Myriam ultimately died of cerebral anoxia (deprivation of oxygen t0 the brain),” said a Mama Mia report.
Micheline believes that there had been three grave mistakes that led to her daughter’s death.
The first was that Myriam failed to tell her boyfriend that she had life-threatening allergies. The second was Myriam didn’t carry with her an epinephrine autoinjector, an item used for the treatment of anaphylaxis. The third mistake was Myriam had not been wearing her allergy identification bracelet.
Micheline doesn’t blame her daughter’s boyfriend, especially since he didn’t know about the allergy, but she believes that had Myriam worn the identification bracelet like she was supposed to, Myriam would still be alive.
Her daughter had always lived a normal life, Micheline says. Everyone knew about her condition, and she always carried with her an EpiPen.
Now Micheline is insisting that identification bracelets be worn in order to prevent situations her daughter had found herself in, and in the process save lives.
“We must insist on the bracelet,” she says. “If she had had the Medic-Alert bracelet, her boyfriend would have seen it before [the situation occurred].”
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