My Allergies: A History
So there is a post on HN about a treatment for food allergies.
I don't really KNOW how to fix this BUT I have had food allergies and I have had them get worse and then I have had them get better again.
So I have a great mom and she was in some ways "indulgent." I never liked wearing wool and so she just didn't make me wear wool.
Wool made me itch. I thought it was a texture thing until I was in my thirties and really sick and realized I needed more antihistamines on days when I wore my ONLY wool coat.
(FACEPALM)
I didn't grow up eating a lot of fish or seafood. Dad didn't much like fish, so mom just didn't much serve fish.
In the summer -- and ONLY in the summer -- on Friday night, we would order takeout catfish, hush puppies, fries and cole slaw from a local place called Pritchett's Fish Kitchenette. To my shock, in my teens I learned this was a RESTAURANT. Like with tables and everything. Who knew?
I just thought it was some funky local takeout place. Because we only ever got takeout.
Catfish is the only fish I have ever eaten all that much of in my life. It's a riverine species, not seafood, and I tolerate it better than ocean-going fish.
So my suspicion is I inherited something from my dad that never got really identified as "a food intolerance" because he was the man of the house and he didn't need an excuse to say "I just don't like fish. Don't cook it for me too often."
Some relative of mine introduced me to shrimp at some point and I was willing to eat that OCCASSIONALLY for a few years and then I had a big medical crisis in my thirties and maybe the same year I was bedridden for a few months, I began throwing up after eating shrimp but I was just so very, very, very sick that year that it was December after ending up in the ER from having a single shrimp off my husband's plate at a restaurant that I looked back and went "Oh. I was throwing up AFTER EATING SHRIMP. Duh."
I had two contrast-dye CAT scans that year and a friend of mine who was a former RN told me the dye was probably iodine and shellfish is high in iodine. So most likely the high exposure to iodine took me from "I can eat shrimp OCCASSIONALLY" to "I'm outright allergic and can't keep this stuff down."
A few years later, I actually broke out in hives when I walked through someone's kitchen where they were cooking shrimp. I basically stopped eating fish entirely for a long time and still mostly don't eat it anymore, though I have grown less sensitive over time.
I took a lot of prescription medication that year. That may have been the same year I spent the summer going back to the ER within 48 hours of running out of antibiotics and SOME of the drugs they gave me had side effects like "Kills some small percentage of people." Yay.
And then I enrolled in a college chemistry class for my degree and ended up in the ER after the first wetlab. And while in the ER I realized "It must have been the chemicals from the lab earlier today." and got up and pulled my pants off, and got back in bed and covered up and sent my husband home to get me a change of clothes and that stopped my anaphylactic reaction.
So that was something like maybe September and then in December I had that single piece of shrimp from my husband's plate in some restaurant and spent the next WEEK in bed feeling like I had been beaten with a baseball bat. Merry Christmas to ME.
I began doing a lot of home remedies and I used chamomile tea so much as poultice that I had some hand towels with dark, permanent stains from it that I had decided were the designated poultice towels and I also used a LOT of mint that year. I have a ragweed allergy and later learned chamomile is part of the ragweed family.
So it helped save my life and helped get me off of really strong prescription drugs and helped put a stop to me ending up in the ER every time I turned around, but I ended up allergic to both mint and chamomile. I now can consume mint again, but for some years I had to very much limit it because I would react allergically.
At one point when exposed to a lot of chemicals and still on a fair amount of daily medication, I began reacting allergically to eggs and had to remove them from my diet. Egg yolks are high in sulfur and sulfur issues run in the family. I have several relatives who have issues with sulfur and while very sick this reached some tipping point and I had to stop eating eggs for a few months.
I usually LIMIT consumption of eggs but I just had to stop altogether that year but I can again eat eggs these days.
So when very, very sick and taking LOTS of drugs and being exposed to strong chemicals and being exposed to large amounts of specific things, like mint tea and chamomile and iodine, I became seriously allergic for a TIME to various things. With gradually getting healthier, a lot of those allergies have been walked back to a more normal for me status of "I can consume them occassionally, just not all the time."
Some things I am confident helped walk this back:
I don't really KNOW how to fix this BUT I have had food allergies and I have had them get worse and then I have had them get better again.
So I have a great mom and she was in some ways "indulgent." I never liked wearing wool and so she just didn't make me wear wool.
Wool made me itch. I thought it was a texture thing until I was in my thirties and really sick and realized I needed more antihistamines on days when I wore my ONLY wool coat.
(FACEPALM)
I didn't grow up eating a lot of fish or seafood. Dad didn't much like fish, so mom just didn't much serve fish.
In the summer -- and ONLY in the summer -- on Friday night, we would order takeout catfish, hush puppies, fries and cole slaw from a local place called Pritchett's Fish Kitchenette. To my shock, in my teens I learned this was a RESTAURANT. Like with tables and everything. Who knew?
I just thought it was some funky local takeout place. Because we only ever got takeout.
Catfish is the only fish I have ever eaten all that much of in my life. It's a riverine species, not seafood, and I tolerate it better than ocean-going fish.
So my suspicion is I inherited something from my dad that never got really identified as "a food intolerance" because he was the man of the house and he didn't need an excuse to say "I just don't like fish. Don't cook it for me too often."
Some relative of mine introduced me to shrimp at some point and I was willing to eat that OCCASSIONALLY for a few years and then I had a big medical crisis in my thirties and maybe the same year I was bedridden for a few months, I began throwing up after eating shrimp but I was just so very, very, very sick that year that it was December after ending up in the ER from having a single shrimp off my husband's plate at a restaurant that I looked back and went "Oh. I was throwing up AFTER EATING SHRIMP. Duh."
I had two contrast-dye CAT scans that year and a friend of mine who was a former RN told me the dye was probably iodine and shellfish is high in iodine. So most likely the high exposure to iodine took me from "I can eat shrimp OCCASSIONALLY" to "I'm outright allergic and can't keep this stuff down."
A few years later, I actually broke out in hives when I walked through someone's kitchen where they were cooking shrimp. I basically stopped eating fish entirely for a long time and still mostly don't eat it anymore, though I have grown less sensitive over time.
I took a lot of prescription medication that year. That may have been the same year I spent the summer going back to the ER within 48 hours of running out of antibiotics and SOME of the drugs they gave me had side effects like "Kills some small percentage of people." Yay.
And then I enrolled in a college chemistry class for my degree and ended up in the ER after the first wetlab. And while in the ER I realized "It must have been the chemicals from the lab earlier today." and got up and pulled my pants off, and got back in bed and covered up and sent my husband home to get me a change of clothes and that stopped my anaphylactic reaction.
So that was something like maybe September and then in December I had that single piece of shrimp from my husband's plate in some restaurant and spent the next WEEK in bed feeling like I had been beaten with a baseball bat. Merry Christmas to ME.
I began doing a lot of home remedies and I used chamomile tea so much as poultice that I had some hand towels with dark, permanent stains from it that I had decided were the designated poultice towels and I also used a LOT of mint that year. I have a ragweed allergy and later learned chamomile is part of the ragweed family.
So it helped save my life and helped get me off of really strong prescription drugs and helped put a stop to me ending up in the ER every time I turned around, but I ended up allergic to both mint and chamomile. I now can consume mint again, but for some years I had to very much limit it because I would react allergically.
At one point when exposed to a lot of chemicals and still on a fair amount of daily medication, I began reacting allergically to eggs and had to remove them from my diet. Egg yolks are high in sulfur and sulfur issues run in the family. I have several relatives who have issues with sulfur and while very sick this reached some tipping point and I had to stop eating eggs for a few months.
I usually LIMIT consumption of eggs but I just had to stop altogether that year but I can again eat eggs these days.
So when very, very sick and taking LOTS of drugs and being exposed to strong chemicals and being exposed to large amounts of specific things, like mint tea and chamomile and iodine, I became seriously allergic for a TIME to various things. With gradually getting healthier, a lot of those allergies have been walked back to a more normal for me status of "I can consume them occassionally, just not all the time."
Some things I am confident helped walk this back:
- Getting off the long list of drugs I used to take.
- Working on getting a "cleaner home" in terms of fewer harsh chemicals (removing particle board is a biggie).
- I did a yeast cleanse diet to help me recover from all the drugs I took for a while.
- I took co-q-10 to correct my brain chemistry because my brain was so fried from so many drugs I couldn't really sleep properly.
- Getting my parasitic infection more under control.
