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My 10-year-old daughter Maya kept getting sick every time she ate lunch at school. Not just a little queasy—full-on vomiting, stomach cramps, the works.

I took her to the pediatrician twice. "Probably a food sensitivity," they said. "Try packing her lunch instead of buying school meals."

So I started making her sandwiches, fruit, crackers—the usual stuff. But she kept getting sick. Only at school, only after lunch.

After three weeks of this, I was getting frustrated. The school nurse suggested it might be anxiety or stress. "Some kids develop psychosomatic symptoms when they're overwhelmed."

But Maya loved school. She had friends, good grades, never complained about going.

One Thursday, she came home and threw up so violently I rushed her to urgent care. They ran blood tests, checked everything. "She's dehydrated, but otherwise healthy. Just keep monitoring her."

That weekend, I decided to do some detective work. I packed her the exact same lunch she'd been eating at school and had her eat it at home. Nothing happened. She was fine.

So it wasn't the food. It was something at school.

Monday morning, I volunteered to help in the cafeteria during lunch period. I wanted to see what was different about her eating environment there.

I watched Maya sit at her usual table with her friends. She opened her lunchbox, started eating her sandwich, and within 10 minutes she looked pale and nauseous.

But here's what I noticed. She was sitting directly under one of those old fluorescent light fixtures. The kind that flickers sometimes.

I asked the cafeteria manager about it. "Oh yeah, that light's been acting up for months. We keep meaning to fix it, but it's not a priority."

I looked up at it more closely. The plastic cover was cracked, and there was some kind of white powdery residue around the edges.

That afternoon, I called the school maintenance department. "I think there might be something wrong with the light fixture above table 6 in the cafeteria."

The maintenance guy came out the next day. When he removed the cover, his face went serious. "Ma'am, you need to see this."

Inside the light fixture was a thick layer of asbestos insulation that had been deteriorating for years. Every time the light heated up, tiny fibers were falling down onto the table below.

Maya had been eating asbestos dust with her lunch for months.

The school immediately closed the cafeteria and called in a hazmat team. They found asbestos contamination throughout the building—in the ceiling tiles, around the heating vents, even in some of the classroom walls.

The building was 60 years old and had never been properly inspected for asbestos removal.

Maya's symptoms disappeared completely once they moved lunch to the gymnasium while they cleaned up the cafeteria.

But here's the part that still makes me angry.

While I was packing up Maya's things from her desk during the cleanup, I found a small notebook she'd been keeping. It was filled with dates and symptoms—she'd been tracking her own sickness for weeks.

On the last page, she'd written: "I think the ceiling is making me sick. Other kids who sit under the lights get sick too, but they don't say anything."

She'd figured it out before I did, but was too scared to tell anyone because she thought the adults wouldn't believe her.

When I asked her about it, she said three other kids in her class had been getting sick during lunch but were afraid to complain because they didn't want to get in trouble.