Living Proof

All throughout my life I’ve always enjoyed seafood, especially shellfish. As I’ve written before on this blog, my father owned a fish market at the South Street Seaport in NYC and brought home every type of fish you could imagine. Wednesday was our seafood night. We had everything from calamari, clams and spaghetti, shrimp, lobster, crab legs - you name it, we had it. Every Christmas we heed to the old Italian tradition of The Feast of the Seven Fishes. We still do it, however I tend to steer clear from it these days. About ten years ago, my sister started developing severe allergic reactions to seafood - mostly shellfish. Symptoms varied from rashes to face swelling, which is an indicator of a possible anaphylactic shock, which could be deadly. Soon after, I began to notice every time I ate shrimp, lobster or crab, I would get hives inside my mouth -- nowhere else. I quit shellfish immediately, but was able to still eat clams and mussels. No one could figure it out. Some would assume ...

It’s amazing how people don’t take you seriously once they know that you have anxiety disorder of some sort, especially doctors. It then becomes a matter of ‘maybe it’s just in her head’ type of thing and while that very well may be the case, they dismiss a lot of things that shouldn’t be overlooked. Yesterday I had an appointment with the allergist. The past couple of years I have been experiencing many reactions from certain foods and products. I experience “physical” side effects, such as bleeding blisters inside my mouth if I eat shrimp, bananas, mangos, berries, apples and sometimes avocados. Sometimes I’m able to eat them, and other times I develop these awful reactions. In recent days, I developed lip and mouth swelling from eating fresh water fish. Nuts and seeds gives me an asthma-like symptom. So all of these foods, which are healthy are out of my diet, leaving me to eat other things that may be not so good for my waistline. I used to love eating cereal with berries or a ba...