Chemotherapy pills make woman smell so bad her daughter's school bans her from visiting

Friday, November 22, 2013 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
Tags: chemotherapy patient, school ban, bad odor

(NaturalNews) A New Mexico mother has been outlawed from visiting her daughter's elementary school after the principle there deemed her pungent body odor offensive. Kerri Mascareno, who is currently trying to battle stage 4 breast cancer using chemotherapy pills, suffers from a condition known as "chemo smell," a side effect of conventional cancer treatment that can leave its victims too smelly for others to bear.

KOB 4 News in Albuquerque reports that Tierra Antigua Elementary School principal Robert Abney asked Mascareno to keep her distance from the school after meeting with the woman in his office. Struck by Mascareno's strong scent, Abney asked the mother of three young girls to step outside the building. But when Mascareno went outside at Abney's request and stood near the window to his office, he allegedly proceeded to ask her to step even further away from the building.

"He just said that he would have to ask me to sit in my car because he could smell me through the window," recalls Mascareno.

"He just said he knows this is going to hurt my feelings and he understands where I'm coming from because his mother had breast cancer and she had the same exact smell and I can no longer be in the school and that with me being in the school that I made his employees ill."

Concerned about how Abney's request might interfere with her plans to attend the school's upcoming Thanksgiving dinner, Mascareno emailed Abney to ask about it. In response, he told the mother that she and her daughters would have to eat the dinner in his office rather than with the rest of the children and their parents, even though the event could be her last to spend with her children.

"For someone to say you can't be with your child... it's really hard," stated Mascareno to reporters in tears.

School says it never banned Mascareno from campus, Thanksgiving dinner

When KOB 4 News crews went to the school to try to talk to Abney in person, he reportedly refused an interview and told them to contact the school's spokeswoman. Not long after, Mascareno received an unexpected email notifying her that she was now welcome to attend the Thanksgiving feast in the cafeteria with everyone else.

But following the incident, Tierra Antigua spokeswoman Monica Armenta, who is also the executive director of communications for Albuquerque Public Schools, told a much different story. Not only did the school not try to exclude Mascareno from the Thanksgiving dinner, she claims, but it also never said she could not approach the campus.

"Never at any time was Ms. Mascareno banned from the school, at no time was she ever told she wouldn't be welcome to join her daughter for [Thanksgiving] lunch," stated Armenta to The Huffington Post via a phone interview. Instead, Abney simply told Mascareno that, if she wanted it, "[the school] could make accommodations for her to have [Thanksgiving] lunch with her daughter in a location other than the cafeteria.

Mascareno has since received a personal phone call from Abney himself requesting her presence at the Thanksgiving lunch. But according to reports, she is no longer sure if she will attend, considering the circumstances.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.kob.com

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://www.statesman.com