Nuts

It was Thanksgiving during my last year of middle school when I learned about my nut allergy. I had grown up my entire life eating nuts, from snacking on peanuts to eating peanut butter in sandwiches. However, my culinary life took a steep turn this Thanksgiving when I discovered my allergy to walnuts. My aunt had always prepared one big special dish every single year that acted as a sort of dessert. Whether people liked this dessert or not was a different story, but the fact that she made one each year was constant. This year, it was a sort of chocolate bready pudding, with walnuts in it. It actually looked pretty tasty this time, and it had an aroma to it that made me want to eat it. I took a bite and thought nothing of it at first. Then, the sensation hit. I felt a burning itch in my ears, extending all the way down to my throat. It was the kind of itch that you kept on scratching at in your ears, but it would never go away, almost as if your earwax was gnawing at you. This in itself was horrid, but I had felt this sensation during my other allergic reactions. The part that supplemented this was the dizziness I had gotten and the difficulty of breathing I had felt when I was moving around. When my family members started to notice my problem, they tried to rush me to my bedroom. My sister even commented that she thought my family was taking our drunk grandma to bed, when in reality it was me. I had gotten to my room, but the pain had remained. The most vivid sensation was having to keep my head up so I could breathe, as I felt my throat closing up. It was the only way I could breathe. I felt like a fish that had been pulled directly out of water. Once my family realized that letting me lie in my bed wasn’t working, they rushed me to the hospital. It’s hard to remember anything past this point, but I know that I stayed in the hospital overnight. It was at this point that my nut allergy had been concluded. Ever since then, I’ve had to consistently ask if there are any nuts in food. There have been a couple of times when I have forgotten to ask, and I’ve ended up in the hospital again. I think the biggest thing I can take away from my experience is that allergies can come out of nowhere, at the most random times.