Booyahman

WE ARE THE TORONTO PUBLIC

Hmm. Well, there's a funny little food/environment allergy crossover that might apply here. When I eat various fruits, my mouth gets itchy. My natural reaction was "My allergy to these fruits must be worse than I thought!" I talked to my doctor about it and I found out I'm not reacting to the fruits; I'm reacting to the pollen on the skin of the fruit!

The weirdest thing I'm allergic to is probably avocado, though at one point in my life my parents tell me they thought I was allergic to, and I quote, "the color red". And I don't mean the dyes, I mean like strawberries and apples.

I am currently on the allergy shot system to deal with my environmental allergies, as I got tired of those hampering my life as I became more sure of myself over the past couple of years and wanted to be out of my room more and more. They work pretty well, though I still regularly take Zyrtec just to make sure and because it helps prevent reactions to the shots themselves.

Allergy shots are pretty much vaccines for allergies, I think. They inject me with things I'm allergic to which helps me not be allergic to them. They are either unsafe or do not work for food allergies.

To the best of my knowledge, we have no process for dealing with allergies to food aside from avoidance. I get asked a lot if I can "Take pills like (some) lactose intolerant people" and the answer is no. It's something we don't really understand much about, food allergies.

I still eat donuts sometimes. Things like pizza or ice-cream are what I'd really like a free pass on, but I can't kid myself into thinking I'd make it through that unscathed.

Depends on if I try to order something that will normally have something I'm allergic to in it. The big offenders here are nuts and dairy. For instance, a lot of Italian places put parmesan in their spaghetti sauce or meatballs, and spaghetti is one of my favorite meals. In that kind of instance, I'll probably just order something else. My safety meals are salmon without butter or anything else (at fancy places) or some form of chicken. At one time I was told not to eat any soy. That's tough, let me tell you. People use soy as an oil to fry things in, grease things, etc all the time now. Must be cheaper than peanut oil. Not that that's any better for my purposes.

Breakfast is the hardest meal. Eggs, breakfast breads (waffles, pancakes, etc) are all made with dairy outside of my own household. I had an instance at IHOP about a month ago where even after I told them not to put milk in the eggs I ordered, and to let me know if milk was inherently in the egg mix, I still had a reaction after I ate the eggs. Even if there isn't milk directly in the food, it's possible the eggs were cooked on a stove-top that had had butter on it previously.