I am super excited! My birthday is in ten days. That’s right readers, in ten days, I will be fifteen years old! Now that birthday time is coming around, I can’t help but think about birthday cakes, ice cream, cupcakes, etc. I can’t help it, I just love desserts, especially around holidays! However, as delicious as they are, they are likely the most dangerous foods a kid with a food allergy will come across.

Of all the foods I have come across, I find it the hardest to find safe desserts. Whether it be cake or ice cream, a lot of desserts contain or are processed with nuts. For example, I never have desserts at restaurants. This is because a lot of times they aren’t made inside the restaurant, but purchased from a factory that manufactured nut products.

It isn’t impossible though, to find safe desserts with allergies, even if you have to make them yourself. My mother has always made my birthday cake for me, and it is delicious, and peanut free. She even makes the frosting herself, because believe it or not, even cake frosting are commonly unsafe. So, for my readers, my birthday present to you is her yummy frosting recipe. I plan on posting other recipes to in later dates, but this is by far one of my favorite foods ever. I can eat it by the spoonful (and sometimes I do!)

For 24 cupcakes

Beat 2 cups butter until smooth

Add 2 teaspoons milk and 1 Tablespoon vanilla

Slowly add 8 cups powdered sugar and continue to beat until fluffy

That’s it!  Yum!

Until next time!

Gary

One of the main reasons that I wanted to start this blog was to educate people on the craziness that is having a food allergy. While many may know about food allergies, or know people with food allergies, it is very difficult to truly understand what it is like unless you have an allergy yourself. So, this group of blog posts are designed to put you I my shoes. This post will be dedicated to teaching you all of the different places that allergens can be found in.

A lot of people look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them that I can’t have the food they’re offering me. They say things like “What? It’s not peanuts!” or “That’s crazy! It doesn’t have peanut butter in it!” The reality is that someone like me with a nut allergy has to avoid more than just bags of salted nuts and jars of peanut butter. To put things in perspective, I am going to list some foods or products, and I want you, my readers, to guess which one’s, if any, might be unsafe for someone with an allergy to peanuts and nuts, like me.

Pizza, hand lotion, dynamite, pretzels, bread, spaghetti sauce, ant traps, milk, soap, pepper (as in salt and pepper, not chili peppers), alcoholic beverages, and chili.

All right, of the products that I’ve listed above, the ones that could contain things that are unsafe for me are (drumroll please): all of them! That’s right, not only do I have to avoid a bunch of food products, but also a bunch of things that have nothing to do with food at all! For example, hand lotion and soap commonly use shea butter, which comes from nuts. Ant traps have food inside of them (which is how they poison the ants). That food commonly contains nuts. Dynamite is literally 2% peanuts! Not that I’m planning to eat dynamite or anything, but it just shows how many places allergens can hide.

If you are still in disbelief, feel free to contact me and ask about something on the list and I will be happy to explain why it is on there. I hope this opens your eyes like my eyes were opened when I first got my allergy.

Until next time!

Gary

So my last post was devoted solely to reflecting on my high school experience in the cafeteria. However, a lot of the issues that arise with having an allergy in school comes from outside of the cafeteria. A lot of times, classrooms can be dangerous for kids with food allergies as well. Snacks that students bring in could have something I’m allergic to, there could be an activity done in class that involves food, class could be after lunch, allowing people that haven’t washed their hands after eating things with peanut butter to contaminate things, or a whole bunch of other crazy unpredictable factors.

It’s not all bad, though. It all depends on who teaches the class. Like all other people, some teachers get your allergy, and some just don’t. It doesn’t mean that those are bad teachers, they just don’t get it.

Considering how many hours I spend a week at school, teachers that try hard to understand my allergy and include me in activities are one of the biggest reliefs to me when it comes to my food allergy.  I will admit that even after dealing with allergies at school for ten years, I feel bad when there are activities that center around food and everyone is enjoying it but me.  I also feel nervous that I might have a reaction.

I had a teacher during my freshman year of high school that was one of the best teachers with my allergy that I have ever come across. There were no snacks in her classroom, she always e-mailed my family whenever she was going to bring in food to the class, even sending photos of the labels. She always let me know in advance if there was an event in school that had food, so that I could actually participate. I really liked her class because I always felt safe there. They are a safe place in a sometimes unsafe environment.

Until next time!

Gary

So, a week of driver’s education has made me think about school a lot. Summer represents a lot of freedom for a kid with an allergy. Meals are always safe, because they are made in my home, which doesn’t have any nuts at all. I go to a lot of places, but I always check to make sure they are peanut free. It is a pretty stress free period of time.  School introduces a whole myriad of problems to the equation, and the event yesterday made me reflect on the problems of my first high school year with my allergy.

One of the most dangerous places for a child with an allergy to be is a school cafeteria. It is literally a room filled with dozens of things that could kill you. Throughout elementary school and middle school, I had a peanut free table that I always sat at. While that allows some safety from peanuts, it introduces some other problems too. Sitting at the peanut free table, I was never really around anyone I would normally sit by, and I found it very hard to build strong friendships when I couldn’t use my lunch period to sit by my friends.

So, during my eighth grade, my family and I decided that I was old enough to sit at my friends’ table. Thus, my first year of high school was my second year that I wasn’t sitting at a peanut free table. Of course, a whole bunch of issues arise from this as well, most of them involving my allergy.

I am old enough to know what (and who) to avoid in order to keep myself safe when it comes to my food allergy, but that is only half the battle. I am simply not safe if the people I sit next to don’t take precautions with my allergy. I’m not asking for them not to eat nuts by me, because I can understand how easy it is for a parent to just whip up a peanut butter sandwich for their kids for lunch. However, sometimes I am exposed to dangerous situations because of my friends.

During my eighth grade class, I have experienced what it was like to be in the crosshairs of a game of “throw the peanut butter sandwich to the kid across the table because I don’t want it right now.” Needless to say, it didn’t really end well. During my freshman year of high school, sharing food happened a lot, so the passing and throwing of food, some containing nuts, to other kids happened a lot. Of course there is always that one kid, no matter what table I sat in, that brought a PB&J sandwich to lunch every day and thought it funny to tell me how delicious it was.

I was also exposed to bullying at the lunch table. People who don’t know any better are constantly “joking around” about my allergy. During my first year of high school, I found it difficult to go a whole lunch period with out someone “joking” about feeding me nuts. They don’t realize that that isn’t a joke, but a threat to my life. Sometimes I feel like even my friends don’t really understand how dangerous my food allergies can be.

I know this was a long post, but I feel better now that I wrote it all down. It’s just kind of frustrating, worrying for your life on a daily basis just because you want to sit by your friends at lunch. Luckily, I think it’s getting better. Near the end of my first school year, events like the ones I mentioned above happened less because my friends were learning more and more about my allergy by being around me. That’s why I truly feel that if others know more about your allergy, it makes you safer in the long run.

Until next time!

Gary

I have recently begun taking driver’s education classes. Besides the obvious worry of crashing into cars, I also worry about driver’s education because of my allergies. In my experience, any environment where there is going to be other people, especially children my age, there is most likely going to be snacks. Normally this is okay, but because of my allergy, this can be a worry. So, just to be safe, my parents called the driver’s education instructor and informed him of my allergy.  They assured my mom that they would tell the instructor.

After hearing this, I felt safe in my driver’s class. Just to make sure, I reminded him of my allergy the first day of class.

So of course, today, he comes walking into class with a big box of cookies, and shouted that it was “cookie day.” The cookies were packaged, so I went up to check the label to see if they were safe, when he threw away the label before I could ask to see it. So I had to sit through a two hour class when everyone was eating potentially deadly cookies, touching things with the hands that touched the cookies, etc.

Realistically, I knew I would be okay. I was sad that I couldn’t have the cookies of course, but I figured that I would survive. However, this is the real danger of allergies. It isn’t the thing that you are allergic to, but the people that don’t understand. The severity of food allergies is misunderstood all the time. Today wasn’t the first time that people misunderstood my allergy and potentially put me in danger, and it definitely will not be the last. However, I believe that education of allergies can severely reduce the amount of events like this, which is one of the main reasons I started this blog. I want to spread the word that food allergies aren’t just something to ignore, but they are a big deal.

It’s frustrating to me that events like that happen so often. However, I am happy that I am able to turn my frustration into something productive. Instead of being angry at people who do not know better, I can do so much more trying to educate them. So, I hope that you, my readers, spread the word about allergies, like I am trying to do, especially if you have food allergies yourselves. Also, to you readers that care to learn, thank you for your time and support.

Until next time!

Gary

I wasn’t diagnosed with my allergy to peanuts until I was four. Before then though, I refused to eat them. I would literally run down the hall if someone was eating a pb and j sandwich.  It seems ridiculous now, I know, but I guess I somehow predicted my nut allergy. However, sometime during 2005, I decided that I wanted a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. My parents, who had been trying to help me overcome my strange nut-phobia for a while, immediately prepared me a sandwich in an excited frenzy. I was finally going to learn that my fear of nuts really was crazy! Well, my face swelled up like a balloon after I barely took a bite and I began to sneeze–not one sneeze, dozens and dozens of sneezes in a matter of minutes. So that was a bust.

My parents immediately gave me Benadryl and took me to the ER, where I was diagnosed with an allergy to peanuts. I didn’t know what to think, when I was told that I had a deadly allergy to nuts. I remember being sad, but I also know I had no idea how much it would affect me and my life. From that day forward, my life changed. My parents immediately threw away every food they had that contained any nuts, and practically cleaned every square inch of the house trying to eliminate everything that might kill me. We researched a lot into nut allergies, learned how to read labels for allergens, found out just how many unexpected places hide nuts, all that jazz.

We continued to remain hopeful though, because the most common age for outgrowing allergies was five to six. Those years came and went and now I’m fourteen, so I guess that was a bust too. However, in the ten years that I have had this allergy, I realized that it could be a lot worse. I have an allergy to peanuts and nuts. However, I know people with an allergy list longer than I could ever imagine. I know people with diabetes, people who have to spend their entire lives in a wheelchair, people with diseases like cancer. In the long run, I feel blessed to only have to worry about a food allergy instead of having to worry about something much more serious.

Until next time!

Gary