I should probably say that I don't have food allergies, but several of my friends do and I bought/read this book while staying with one of those people. So I'm not reading it from the POV of someone who has them, which may be the audience for this? At any rate, it's a very good book and also well, very affecting to read about the kind of shit that poor Sandra has to deal with, as someone who's been allergic to a lot of foods since birth. Everything has to be checked all the time and there's constant food pitfalls to fall into, both accidentally and deliberately. The title comes from having to tell people to not touch her after they've eaten (non-allergy-free) cake at her birthday parties, and she's sad that that's what people remember about her, that she's "Allergy Girl." (Or "Fish Girl" at the college dining hall when that's all she can eat.) Or that she has to constantly police anyone she lives with such as a roommate or boyfriend about their food because someone might eat pizza and then touch the phone three hours later. It sounds exhausting and she notes that even with all of the precautions she does at weddings, about half of the time she still ends up having a reaction. She has them a lot, including doing that on "the road to Hana," in which of course there's nowhere to get medical treatment so they had to drive back on a super windy road for three hours. shudder
It also has given her some mental complexes as well--like being annoyed that her sister chooses to limit her food options by being vegetarian, and having a realization that she doesn't like to eat peas even though that's one of the few safe foods. Can she even HAVE preferences as to what to eat? She has to eat and eat and eat the few foods she can eat, so she may be prone to overeating in those circumstances since her options are so limited.
Sandra explains that even though you have to have an epi-pen, nobody wants to actually have to use the epi-pen and then have to go to the hospital about it, so they'd rather pound Benadryl and be out of it for 24 hours if that cures it without yet another hospital visit. (Which certainly lines up with my having to watch a friend of mine having a reaction to see if he needed to go to the hospital and finding out that no, he doesn't have one...he was fine eventually.) Another person with food allergies that she interviews in the book says she associates food with death, and well...yeah, that seems reasonable.
The book isn't entirely about her experiences, as she does have some more research-y chapters as to what to do in schools (should the entire school be banned from having peanuts, really?) and debunking the "kiss of death" story about the girl who supposedly died from kissing her boyfriend after he eat peanuts. (He ate them like nine hours beforehand and she had some other exposures going on.) Another chapter was about going to a food allergy conference to see what the doctors say about their patients. The one chapter I didn't really get was the "foodie" chapter, in which Sandra tries to be some kind of foodie and watch cooking presentations and take a cooking class where she has to have her then-boyfriend there as backup in case she can't touch something. This seemed pretty illogical to me there.
She also talks to people who have allergies and/or their kids may develop them--she notes in horror being at her best friend's birthday party and watching the friend's 1-year-old getting hives from the cake, and another person wondering if her kid is going to have allergies and how annoying it is that her kid appears to be having a different food allergy than everyone else. Sandra is reasonably concerned if she ever had kids, how could she handle the situation, literally, if they do or don't have what she has. She does mention having relationships here and there, including one long-term one in the past, but I did kind of wonder if she could have put more in there about that since to some degree it sounded like the guy cared but also maybe not as much as he should have? She also notes that she has to live her life scrutinizing everything and her ex was a freewheeling slob, and that just couldn't fly. "My allergies leverage every concern...into a litmus test: Do you love me? Then rinse out that glass. Sometimes I wonder if I'm destined to live alone. Otherwise, I'll have to accept this reality in which once or twice every week I break out in hives in my own house."
(I am reading a lot of "Am I The Asshole?" lately and when food allergies come up there, hoo boy. Recent examples: OP gets peanut cake for their kid, gets allergy-free cake for the allergic kid, but does serve them in the same house and doesn't warn anyone ahead of time this is happening and OP wants to have one sushi dinner, which turns into "we don't have jobs and we're living with someone who cooks shellfish in the house but my wife can't object to it because we're living on his charity." Oy vey. Definitely thought of this book while reading the last one.)
At any rate...doesn't look like this sort of thing is going to improve as life goes on and nobody really seems to know why it's going on, so she'll just have to continue. You just have to hope that you find people who can deal with it, such as one lady's friends having Jenny-safe spoons, or the fancy restaurant that kept trying out different dishes until Sandra had some foods she could eat. "My job is to center on staying safe in this world, but my job is also never to assume the world should revolve around keeping me safe."
Four stars.
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