Unexpected Expertise

Silly question, but how many times have you thrown up in your life?  A dozen?  Perhaps a couple dozen because you were always sick as a child?

This question dawned on me while a housemate was taking care of her sick boyfriend.  He was throwing up and she sought my advice on what to do, because apparently she'd only been that sick once or twice in her life.  I was dumb struck at her ignorance, until later it dawned on me that perhaps it was the other way around.  As odd as it sounds, I’ve come to see myself as an outlier and perhaps even an expert at vomiting.

While the average person throws up less than once per year, I’ve managed close to ten times that.  Thanks to my food allergy, I've thrown up on over a hundred separate occasions and probably closer to twice that.  And without getting too scientific about this, I'd venture a guess that this puts me at least a couple standard deviations out from the norm. 

Fearing Food

Have you ever been afraid to eat a meal?  Not just that it'll taste bad or be too spicy, but that it'll make you seriously ill.  Your friends, who have started eating, reassure you that the food tastes delicious and you’ve already double checked with the chef.  But you’ve got a growing sense of unease about putting this food in your body...and given your history of food allergies, you have every right to be afraid.

There are many food related issues, like anorexia or simply being picky, which are psychologically based.  They involve irrational feelings about your food and are, simplistically speaking, remedied by changing mental habits.  By contrast, food allergies involve a highly rational fear towards food - some meals really could kill you.

At one point or another, practically everyone I love has poisoned me.  Their errors have involved reusing a dirty knife while prepping sandwiches, not reading the ingredients in a spice jar, and assuming salami contained nothing more than dried meat.  These were all innocent mistakes and I don’t hold it against my family, but the consequence each time was that I spent a couple hours in the bathroom getting sick.  It only took a couple mishaps for everyone to start taking my allergy seriously, but even after that it was a real struggle to keep me fed safely.

During my childhood, we mostly ate at home because it gave my mom better control over what food got in front of me.  Butter was not allowed in our house and the cheese was confined to it’s own drawer in the fridge.  When we did eat out, I tended to order the same thing over and over again because I knew it was safe.  Every new dish felt like Russian roulette and even the repeats were prone to the occasional error.

I had my first cheeseburger when I was a teen.  My mother had found a new “dairy free” cheese at the market and was excited to finally share this American tradition with me.  A few bites in, my face began turning red and she frantically reread the ingredients, only to find a milk byproduct was on the list despite the package’s labeling.  A few years later, a camp counselor unknowingly retried the experiment.  In response to my concerns, he reassured me that this was dairy free, vegan cheese…nope.

Over the course of my life, I’ve had over thirty thousand tasty meals without incident, but a few dozen have left me psychologically scarred.  When even a well vetted meal might bring hours of pain, paranoia becomes a means of survival.  I am, quite rationally, afraid of my food.

Overcoming Dairy

For my entire life, I have suffered from severe food allergies.  They were discovered early on, after what seemed like a perfectly ordinary morning.  My father had a cup of coffee and then kissed his infant child goodbye as he left for work.  Soon thereafter, my skin began to turn red and the shape of my father’s kiss became swollen on my cheek.  My mother drove me to the hospital in a panic and I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy, my reaction having been triggered by the milk my father had in his coffee.  From then on, everything about our relationship with food changed.

Over the years, nearly all of my family members and close friends have had a personal encounter with my allergies.  Some accidentally fed me food with dairy, while others simply watched me transition from happily eating a meal to becoming violently ill.  And everyone who’s eaten in a restaurant with me has witnessed my CIA like investigations with waiters about their menu.

I have countless memories from my youth where I abruptly left the dinner table in anguish.  In college I wound up in the hospital for a week because I took a sip of the wrong drink at a party.  And during vacations, I have spent more than a few nights in various countries curled around a toilet, writhing in pain because of translation errors.  Despite my best efforts and the vigilance of my family and friends to protect me, I continued to have a few ordeals each year even into adulthood.  It’s not clumsiness, but just a matter of time and statistics - of the thousands of meals I eat each year and tens of thousands of ingredients, a few of them are bound to slip through the cracks and be problematic.

Fearing that one mishap would eventually do me in, I decided to do more than build walls and wait.  I began to experiment on myself in pursuit of a cure, and in doing so began to understand and face one of my greatest fears.  What I discovered was that dairy had shaped considerably more than my eating habits.  It had deep psychological consequences on my development, as well as my family and close friends.

As I shared my process of experimentation and discovery with others, I was met mostly with confusion and cautionary resistance.  Just as I had, they struggled to understand the full physiological and psychological implications of my disease, and in doing so struggled to empathize with my pain and support my eagerness for action.  My pursuit of a cure thus became a pursuit of self discover, growth, and a struggle to be understood.