“Peanut” has been a dirty word in my house for longer than I can remember; as if we were a family of wizards cowering in the shadow of Voldemort; as if by speaking the profanity we would bring down a mortal curse on our first-born son (myself). My mother can barely stand to imagine myself and a peanut in the same mental frame. It’s no wonder; she’s seen me on the brink of death four times (too many) and swollen like a balloon, with my dignity battered, after losing a duel with the dastardly plant. Of course, the taboo around the word has softened as I’ve grown older and more capable of self-defense, and am out of the home for most of the year. Even so, my mother’s mind is still visibly set on edge if I tell her I’ve forgotten to take my EpiPen anywhere with me.
As few as twenty-five years ago, only at the absurdist theatre would one expect to meet such a family—a family which lives in constant fear of a small, crunchy hunk of cellulose. Unfortunately, this has become strange reality for many more families than my own.
“Anaphylactic” literally means defenseless; giants though we are, the smallest particle has the power to topple us. For an anaphylactic, the shadow of death skulks in the silliest places: vending machines, refrigerators, ice-cream parlors, and parks where nice old ladies feed squirrels. The mundane randomness of the peanut, as well as milk, eggs, and other embarrassingly benign foods that our bodies lethally reject, allow them to slip beneath the radar of the common mind. People appear to have an easier time empathizing with a diabetic or cancer patient—diseases where the enemy is one’s own body, which must be constantly moderated, used gingerly, and plied with medicine; a situation we’ve all experienced in times of illness. However, to the average onlooker I imagine an anaphylactic must look like a barefoot Achilles carefully avoiding sharp stones on the ground, or King Stefan of Sleeping Beauty obsessively purging his kingdom of doomful spinning wheels. Oftentimes, I feel embarrassed about how silly my own requests for accommodation sound. After a new acquaintance has invited me into his home for the first time, I find myself asking him to move a bag of mixed nuts from the living room to the kitchen. If he doesn’t answer my request, instead of insisting I just move to the far end of the couch, and take care not to touch my face with my fingers for the rest of the night.
My best anaphylaxis story (I say that only half-ironically) is about the first time I had dinner at my girlfriend’s house. Like the careful person she was, she instructed her parents not to cook with any nuts. Needless to say, it is rather uncouth to kill your daughter’s boyfriend. We sat down and I began to endure the sincere rituals of meeting the parents. I then noticed that I had begun to have an allergic reaction—how awkward. Since my girlfriend had assured me that no nut products (and especially, no peanuts) had entered the meal, I suspected that it was likely just an accidental sliver of almond that had snuck into the lamb or the salad, and I resolved to silently weather my reaction for the sake of my relationship with her parents. They were native Chinese; China being a country where allergy rates have historically been miniscule. I didn’t want to cause a fuss over an itchy throat, so I would just eat around … whatever it was that I had eaten. Almost half an hour later, after the meal (with dessert, no less!), I felt nauseous, so I excused myself to the upstairs bathroom. Looking in the mirror, I observed that I was bright red. I was up against no mere almond.
Five minutes later, her father was racing me to the hospital. I did my best to keep her calm as we sat in the back seat, even as my face gradually became more inflated and hideous in front of her.
The instigating food item had been a precooked onion pancake that been cooked in peanut oil. I had eaten the same dish, cooked in different oil, a week earlier, and presumed this time it would also be safe. It was an honest mistake on their part; perhaps they had never experienced eating with an allergic person before.
I survived the event, as any adequately prepared anaphylactic would (thanks for reminding me to bring my EpiPen, mum). I was able to keep cool the entire time because I had done it before (I hadn’t died any of the other times), and I figured my luck would hold out this time as well. And hold out it did—my girlfriend later told me I had impressed her father with my stoicism.
That incident was the fourth time I had almost been killed by my condition. (There has since been a fifth, which my mother won’t know about until she reads this preface I’ve written here.) I’ve already accepted it as something that would happen to me from time to time, like a monkey learning that tigers are a fact of the forest. I’ve been content my entire life constrained in my circumstances simply because I’ve known nothing else.
Besides, there are plenty who have it much worse than me. There are cases of children who must be carefully isolated, usually entailing homeschooling, because they are sensitive to such a vast array of things (they will likely live in a bubble for their entire lives). At least I have the luxury of being able to visit my girlfriend’s parents’ house—and the luxury of being unafraid to touch doorknobs.
Whereas I’ve always been very nonchalant in my approach to my allergy, my mother has refused to accept my absurd reality at every turn. For many years, she’s been battling the notion that this is the way that things must be.
Young people, myself included, tend to think of ourselves as unkillable protagonists covered in impenetrable plot armor. Parents are smarter than their children; they have been the narrators that kept their main characters from dying throughout their childhood and they have known just how easy it can be to lose something. Any risk factors must be eliminated; that’s why my mom cares so much about getting to the root of this phenomenon. Even if it’s too late for her to live a motherhood without the constant threat of losing a child, and too late for me to live a childhood where I get to eat peanuts (I expect they taste amazing, or you all would have no excuse for eating them), perhaps we can help the parents of the future and make a world without bubble children or Sabrina Shannons.
Since 1990, the peanut-allergic population of the United States has more than tripled, now numbering a tragic three million individuals. We know how to treat it, we know how to mitigate it, but we still haven’t agreed on what causes it, let alone figured out how to cure it. Large-scale anaphylaxis has not always been a fact. Anaphylaxis occurs rarely in many parts of the world; this may indicate a short-term, likely human cause historically unique to westernized countries. If this is the case, it is baffling that we haven’t discovered it already.
Woodrow Fraser-Boychuk holds a BA in creative writing & English language and literature from Western University.