What are you allergic to?

I have known since I was around 4 or 5 years old I was allergic to dog and cat dander (results in coughing and sneezing) and springtime pollen. I took allergy shots in junior high which pretty much eliminated the pollen allergies though.

Interestingly, this past year I had a few instances of when I would swallow food and it would get stuck in my esophagus and I would have choking motions and have to run to the bathroom to cough out food. I did some googling and thought it might be a "Schaltzki's ring" but I saw a gastroenterologist to see what was going on. They knocked me out and put a tube down my throat and said it was food allergies of some sort that were causing my esophagus to be inflamed and irritated, thus causing me to "choke" on things. They told me to have a food allergy test done and it turns out I have low level allergies to many foods I eat on a regular basis such as salmon, peanuts and soy (I was eating a PBJ sandwich every day and I had soy milk with my cereal everyday). Now that I have replaced those foods with other things I haven't had any issues.

 

So glad that you and they were able to find out what was causing the choking!

 

Hey, me too!

I'm lucky never to have suffered anaphylaxis. As a baby and younger child, I would usually throw up if I ate too much nut content. In time I clued into the preliminary sensations of an allergic reaction—hives in my mouth, tingling lips, scratchy throat, sometimes and odd taste sensation—and I'd stop eating whatever it was.

As a baby, I was also allergic to cow's milk and fish. My dad was holding lil' baby DIA once and dropped a chunk of cheese on my arm, causing it to swell to double its size. I grew out of the dairy allergy early enough that I have no conscious recollection of it, and my seafood allergy was gone by the time I turned 9.

I've managed to grow out of most of my tree nut allergies over time as well. I've been good for some time with almonds and hazelnuts, and I'm borderline with pecans and walnuts, I think—it still weirds me out to consume anything that includes them in the ingredients, since I'm still on high alert from a lifetime of allergic reactions. Cashews and pistachios are still a no-go, and by a considerable margin.

I think I can at least partially credit low-grade exposure over time to lowering my sensitivity to almonds and hazelnuts. My mom used to pack Entenmann's mini chocolate frosted donuts—my favorite—into my school lunches in elementary and middle school. At some point I got bored and read their ingredients and was surprised to see they, at some point in that time, were adding filberts, a close relative to hazelnuts, to the donut recipe. I guess my daily donut addiction desensitized me to hazelnut juju, and now I can eat Nutella—yay!

Fun story... @PonyPotato might remember this if she stumbles back over here anytime soon. In 2015, she came to visit me and we did an all-day bicycle tour to some local breweries in the area. I was ravenous by the time we reached our brewery stop at the halfway point and grabbed a handful of bars and chews from a basket in the tasting room. Not thinking twice about the contents of the Hammer Nutrition® "Apple Oat" bar in my hands, I ripped it open and wolfed down half of it in one gulp. Minutes later my gut started to churn, and I glanced at the wrapper to see its first ingredient—not mentioned anywhere on the front of the wrapper–was cashew butter.

(What I didn't realize was that Hammer Nutrition specializes in nut butter, particularly cashew butter, as the staple ingredient for their bars. Welp.)

I should have called the ride or tried to force myself to throw it back up while we were still at that brewery, but I was stubborn and stupid and didn't want to pull the plug early on what had started out as a lovely day for a ride. So we pressed on. I was managing alright as long as I was still moving and figured, maybe, I'd make it the 10-15 miles or so we had left in the ride.

That was until PP's rented touring bike got a mechanical.

As soon as we stopped, my guts twisted painfully and disapprovingly, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to finish. I guess whatever angry inflammatory response I was accustomed to experiencing in my mouth and on my lips was churning deep inside my innards, and they were not happy.

Long story short, a friend and local bike mechanic lived nearby; I was lucky to have his home phone number programmed into my contacts, I called his wife to ask for help. We made it to their house and I unloaded, well, everything, in her bathroom. Too weak by then to ride back the 10 miles home, she called her husband at the bike shop, and he swung by to drive us home.

Lesson learned—read the fucking ingredients.