Throughout my life, I’ve struggled with allergies and intolerances, and I always will, but over the years I’ve learned how to deal with them. Allergies are when you go into anaphylaxis shock causing breathing difficulties and swelling of the face. Intolerances cause sickness and diarrhea.
May 15th, 2003. From the day I was born, we didn’t know about any allergies that I had yet to get, this is due to breastfeeding. I don’t remember being this young but from what I’ve been told I was a healthy baby and never really had any health problems. I was around five months when I started eating proper food. By the age of one the only food we knew I had a problem with was E-Numbers we found this out due to them being in medicine. I only ever drank water or milk and never really had any junk food until I started primary school. This is slow when I started having problems with food.
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I had gone from being healthy and fit to being sick for multiple days in a row. No one really understood why this was happening. I got referred to a pediatrician and they said that it was probably intolerances or allergies. I was in and out of the hospital while they figured out what was happening. I had blood test results come back saying I had an egg intolerance. When they diagnosed me with egg intolerance, they also said there was another allergy but, it was so obscure they don’t know what it was. Since then it’s been quite challenging with finding food I can eat. Since then checking packets of food and checking all the ingredients has become a daily part of my life. Not knowing what my other allergy was what made it very difficult for me.
When you're little you don’t really understand the impact health problems can have on you and how they will affect your whole life. I ate quite plain food, most meals were meat, vegetables, and potatoes or rice, as they were simple, and we knew they wouldn’t affect me. We never really went out to restaurants just in case they contained eggs, if we did, we always had to ask if it had eggs in it even if it seemed like it wouldn’t. I’ve had to do this for the past 9 years. The pediatrician told me that I was probably going to have egg intolerance for the rest of my life.
Around the age of nine, my parents bought an at-home allergy testing kit to see if we could find out what the other unknown allergy was. This came back with some very unusual results. It came back with egg, milk, wheat, gluten, and citrus fruits, and the one that confused us the most was water. We knew that this couldn’t be right as most of your body is made up of water. We tested the other items that came back just in case. The first ones we took out were milk and wheat/gluten, we noticed the rash on my arms and face started to disappear, I didn’t want to completely cut these out so I just tried to limit myself on how much I had of them each day, I still do this now as it makes a big difference on how I feel, I tend to drink lactose-free milk when I can. Testing different food items and cutting things out of my diet has been an ongoing thing I’ve done for the past years since having allergy issues. Since being diagnosed it’s got a lot easier with eating foods. Until recently.
2018... My allergies have caused Many problems in my life, but I never thought it would be this bad. I’ve always been scared to eat certain foods because of the reaction they would give me but still carried on. In the summer, of 2018 my mum and I decided to go vegetarian, it was fine in the beginning, but it soon went downhill, I noticed I started losing weight, which I thought was a bonus, but I soon realized it wasn’t. I cut down on how much I was eating until I eventually hardly did. It got to the point where I started feeling sick whenever I ate. I had lost so much weight. I blamed not eating on the fact everything contained meat or I couldn’t eat it because of my allergies. It affected me horrifically and friends and family had to make sure I was eating. Even now, at the beginning of 2020, I still struggle, but I’m never going through that again. I don’t want my allergies to ruin my life.
In March 2019 this changed. On the 26th of March 2019, I was rushed to hospital. It was one of the scariest things I’ve gone through. I thought it was just a cold. That night I came home from school with an extremely bad headache, I had my dinner then tried to sleep. About an hour later I woke up choking. I didn’t know what was happening, every time I breathed in, I would cough to try to get air. My mum came through and noticed I didn’t look well; she gave me an antihistamine hoping that would help. It did, but not for long. 10 mins later I got a lot worse, I was still struggling to breathe, my face started to swell up, my face was tingling as well as my hands and feet slowly going numb. I was slowly starting to blank out and acting a lot differently from how I normally would. I don’t really remember much of this, the parts I do remember were very frightening. I couldn’t control how I was acting. This was my first-ever allergy attack. Luckily my neighbor is a nurse, so we phoned her, and she immediately came around and told me to go straight to the hospital, once getting to the hospital we were told that it was a viral infection and I was given antibiotics. It wasn’t a viral infection. It was an allergy attack. On the 28th of March, I was due to go to Paris with my school. I wasn’t allowed to go on this due to the attack, I was extremely upset as this is not the first thing I have missed out on due to my allergies or intolerances. A couple of weeks later after multiple blood tests, the doctors had told me I had glandular fever, which has no cure. This affected me for around 5 months and even now at the end of September, there are still some days where I struggle. The glandular fever had a massive impact on my health and caused me to miss out on a lot of things. Since all this has happened, I have had around 5 allergy attacks, but we are unsure of what caused them. I have been given Epi-pens to help with this.
My allergies have affected me a lot throughout my life. Not many things affect me in life, but this is one of them. Whenever I go out, I’m always nervous about ordering food even if I’ve eaten it before or have made sure it doesn’t have eggs in it. There’s always the fear. For most of my life, I’ve been affected by allergies and I know that the rest of my life is going to be affected by the fear of eating one thing you’ve had multiple times before to then being rushed to the hospital and having a needle pushed into you to save your life. I sometimes wish I didn’t have allergies. I feel that I could fit in more and not be treated differently due to them or excluded from things. At the same time, I’m grateful that there’s a cure and that it's manageable. I hope one day I find out everything I am allergic to or have them all go just so I could live my life without the worry of not knowing.
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