When One Diagnosis Can Change Everything
There’s this core idea behind Raffy's village: the people around you who understand without you having to explain it first. Sharing stories is one small way we try to build that, one family at a time. This one belongs to Tammy Pruscino, founder of My Med Pouch, and a parent who's lived every part of what follows.
Marcus ate peanut butter on toast most days of his life. Almonds were a regular treat; baby chinos and macarons whenever the family went out. Walnuts came up less often, but he'd had them before, and been fine.
That history is the whole reason the diagnosis, when it came at age six, landed the way it did.
Life before
Tammy Pruscino grew up in a house where nuts were just food. They were on the table, in the cupboard, in everything. It genuinely never crossed her mind that her son might be allergic to them and when he first reacted, even the rest of the family waved it off. Nah. I really don't think so.
So when the allergist confirmed it: a serious reaction, EpiPens required, strict avoidance, Tammy describes sitting in the car afterward in total shock. She'd gone into that appointment braced for the opposite: for someone to tell her it was nothing, that he didn't actually have a nut allergy at all.
The turning point
That shock didn't fade quietly. It turned into vigilance: the kind she now half-jokingly calls "full-blown mental mom mode." Double-checking everywhere. She recalls one visit to her in-laws' house, spotting walnuts sitting in a box near the kids' play area, and going straight into protection mode.
It's a small detail, but it's the one that says the most: the fear didn't live in dramatic moments. It lived in ordinary rooms, in things left out on ordinary shelves.
Around the same time, the practical problem became just as pressing as the emotional one. Tammy was carrying a medical bag everywhere: school runs, holidays, everywhere. And it was clinical-looking, impractical, missing the features and pockets a real bag for what real life actually needs. That gap sat there, unresolved, for a while.
What changed
The bigger turning point wasn't the allergy itself. it was Tammy's own body, years later. She'd left a career in law she genuinely loved, pushed through the disruption of COVID home-schooling and lost external support, and kept going anyway, the way caring humans do.
It wasn't until life went back to "normal" that she realized her body hadn't caught up. She was exhausted, and it took months of sitting with that before she made the call to stop.
What came after wasn't a plan so much as a piece of advice, passed on from someone else: write down what you're actually passionate about, because that's the only kind of business you'll stick with.
Tammy already had her answer sitting in her hands, literally, the bag she'd been improvising with for years, and the fact that no one had built the version she actually needed.
That's how My Med Pouch started.
What it's actually like now
Marcus has since outgrown a chunk of what once defined daily life. The family can walk into a Greek cake shop now, order coffee and cake, and it's simple. That would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
But Tammy is careful not to overstate how resolved it feels. On a recent visit to her parents' house, everyone reassured her they could finally have cake, but she didn't have the EpiPen with her.
Her surprising response wasn't relief. It was: he's not eating it today.
She's candid that she doesn't know if that instinct will ever fully go away, and doesn't try to pretend otherwise. She calls it, plainly, a kind of trauma and one that may simply be lifelong.
At the same time, she notices the small signs of progress. She didn't call her husband to remind him to bring the bag that day. In the past, she always would have.
Marcus's list of tree nuts to reintroduce, cashew, hazelnut, pistachio, macadamia, still sits ahead of them. Tammy's approach to it now is the same one she'd have used for a baby, just applied to a teenager: one at a time, watch closely, don't rush it.
Who she is, outside of it
When I ask Tammy to describe herself in ten words, she gets most of the way there easily enough. Determined, passionate, enthusiastic, perfectionist, empathetic, too empathetic, loyal, kind, before she stalls for a moment.
Two more beats, and she lands on loving and helpful, laughing a little by then, half-worried it sounds like bragging.
“It's a genuinely hard question”, she says, because you have to actually believe those things about yourself rather than just say them out loud. It's the same instinct she'll admit to elsewhere, almost in passing: she's harder on herself than she needs to be.
What are the 3 most important things in your life right now and how are you prioritising them?
What she prioritises doesn't shift much day to day. Family comes first, without qualification. Marcus, now old enough that she's helping with homework and simply being there for him emotionally as he moves through his teenage years. And then with Catherine, and her steady rhythm of netball and being the one who drives her there.
Building My Med Pouch sits alongside that, not below it. It’s the pull of learning a business inside and out, doing it properly, and the glowing pride of knowing families are actually out there using what she made.
And underneath both, something she's had to learn rather than something that came naturally: her own health and wellbeing.
She's candid that this wasn't a priority for most of her life. She ran on the assumption that her body was a machine, that she could be everything to everyone, until she crashed and found out otherwise. These days that means actually reading her body's cues before it forces the issue: noticing when she's exhausted, and stepping back before it becomes a crash again.
What makes you happy to be alive and how can you make more of that every day?
Asked what makes her feel most alive, her answer isn't complicated: holidays, and the version of ordinary life that borrows a little of that feeling. A beach afternoon in summer, a meal out together, even something as small as coffee and cake.
That last one carries more weight than it sounds like it should. Going to a Greek cake shop used to be entirely out of the question because of Marcus's allergies.
Now it's available.
She's quick to say she hopes other allergy families get to feel that same shift eventually too, not because every child outgrows their allergy, but because she knows what it means when the ordinary stops feeling dangerous.
Why did you start MyMedPouch?
What comes through in Tammy's story isn't a clean before-and-after.
It's that the practical problem (a bag that didn't work) and the emotional one (a fear that doesn't fully switch off, even after the medical risk has genuinely reduced) never really separated from each other.
My Med Pouch exists because both of those things were true at once, and neither was going away on its own.
It's also, in her words, no longer just a business she runs. It's something that's already out in the world helping other families feel a bit safer when they're out and about. That's the part she comes back to when asked why she started it in the first place: not the product, but the people now carrying it.
This article is based on a conversation with Tammy Pruscino, founder of My Med Pouch, and reflects her family's experience only.o
Tammy's story is one thread of Raffy’s Village. If yours belongs here too, we'd love to hear it.
