I don’t really know what happened, but this is what people tell me. I was three or four and helping my dad make dinner. As he prepared the mean he also snacked on crackers covered in peanut butter. Obviously I asked for one. After I consumed the treat I began to feel strange. This feeling went from a tingling in my mouth to a tightening of my chest. I had an allergic reaction to the peanut butter. The doctor was called and I ended up fine.

The biggest impact of that night was the medications I soon had to carry. For the longest time I remember lugging around a small bag pack full of medicine. I had inhalers, epipens, benadryl and stuff I never even knew the name of. This was the worst just because of how tedious it was to carry a bag I never needed, but I knew I had to. The only time that the bag pack was actually used was during field day. A friend of mine had some medical emergency and needed an inhaler. When the school nurse came around asking if anyone had one, my supplies finally came in handy.

Probably the funniest part of that bag pack was the translations in it. When I was younger my mom, sisters and I used to travel around the world. We went to China, Egypt, Greece, all over. When ever we traveled to a country that didn’t have English as its first language my mom would mail the Embassy and request cards with warnings about our allergies translated in all the major languages spoken there. I ended up having a note card in over seven different languages in the bag pack that I carried mainly in New York. Even better was the extra bag we brought with us to China. One of my sisters, Nancy, was allergic to tree nuts. My mother was worried that the food in china would always have some form of peanuts or tree nuts in it. To insure we got food she brought an entire suitcase full of American food, like pop tarts, cereal, and chips.

The only event that I can recall with my nut allergy was when I was 11 or 12 at a summer camp. It was make your own Sunday Sunday, so naturally I went for the vanilla covered in everything. As I got to the toppings I found it weird that there was an option for m&m’s and Halloween color m&m’s even though it was summer. I pushed aside my curiosity and devoured my desert. As I inhaled my ice cream decadence I over heard my friends taking about how good the Reese’s m&m’s were. I looked down in fear to see an empty bowl. My heart sank. Before I totally flipped, I realized I felt fine. I decided to wait ten minutes and see what happened. Then 20. Then 40. Then I told my mom when I got home. The next step for me was the great food allergy “Challenge.”

My mother and I went down to Mount Sania on a school day, which I thought was awesome, even though my mom made me do school work. The challenge started with me getting a needle in my fore arm to directly inject epinephrine incase anything went wrong. The next step was me eating a piece of chocolate that tasted like a mixture of soap and peanut butter, each time the piece grew larger and larger. Finally I had a quarter of a peanut butter sandwich, then the other quarter, and finally the last half.

I some how outgrew my allergy, and since that day I have been trying to make up for time that I couldn’t eat Reese’s or Butterfingers.

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