When Food Can Kill You: Coping With Severe Food Allergies | National Geographic
Morning. It is not a terminal illness that my child has, but it is an every day, every second, every moment, the unknown of every day. He could possibly die, and we have no clue when it's gonna happen sometimes. But if we're prepared, we're continuing on his life.
Who here is allergic to peanuts, seafood, all treatments, shellfish, Kiwis, cucumbers, sesame, peas, chickpeas, lentils, lima beans? He used to be allergic to eggs, which he outgrew. Is there anything else that I'm missing? And coconut. It's ever-changing, and that's the guessing game that I don't like.
Some people don't believe that food allergies are real at all. A lot of people think that they should be able to give their kids whatever foods they want and send them off to school with as much peanut butter and tree nuts. What they don't understand is they're putting a child's life at risk. He could be on a playground, and somebody could have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, keep going on the same monkey bars, and then he could go ahead and pick his nose or wipe his lip, and he could have a reaction.
This is why being in school is so crazy too. Because they're using the same keyboards, they're opening the same box. It's the unknown that's really scary.
Oh, big open one done one time! There are a lot of theories about my allergies being increasing, and probably many of them have contributed. The most popular one that's out there is called the hygiene theory. The hygiene theory says that we live in too clean an environment, and that if you're not exposed to enough in a way of germs or bacteria or infections early in life, your immune system will not be kept busy and will focus on things like allergies.
So there's all these theories of why, and that's what I used to focus on: why this is happening. I also felt like, what did I do during my pregnancy that increased his chances of having food allergies? So there's a lot of mom guilt too. But now I'm just like, we just have to deal with it because there's no solving it just yet.
You have to plan for your food allergy every day, every meal, every snack, but what the ingredients of that food are. The second big piece of it that runs your life is you have to be ready for that accidental exposure, that accidental reaction. And one of the real scary things is you never know what the next reaction will look like. He ate half a cashew, and immediately within five minutes, my son was turning blue.
He has to know how to stand up for himself, keep himself safe. So it's a combination of physical and emotional stuff we go through on a regular basis, so he is prepared. I would do all of those things that any young, beautiful child, adolescent, teenager, adult wants to do: when he has his first kiss, wanting to travel the world, go to college, and become an independent person.
Watching that, all of those things for him are gonna come with some sense of responsibility for food allergies. But if we raise a child who's confident and happy with himself, hopefully he'll be just fine. With coding, every man who has a dream of having a child, dream of a child like Caesar. Look at him, and you just say, I cannot believe he's sick.