Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

by Sandra Beasley

  In one study sponsored by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, 54 percent of a pool of teenagers with severe allergies indicated purposefully ingesting a food known to contain at least a tiny amount of an allergen. Nearly half of those kids cited the rationale “It looked good and I wanted to eat it.”

  Most parents know to expect Superman Syndrome from their kids. According to that study, the good news is that teenagers with allergies, unlike most, know they’re vulnerable. The bad news is, many don’t care—at least, not enough to sit at the peanut-free lunch table or teach their friends how to use an EpiPen or wear jeans with pockets roomy enough for an inhaler. In an earlier study, the same team of doctors found that teenagers said that the hardest part of living with food allergies was “social isolation.” Their parents cited the most difficult issue as “fear of death.”

  I was worried about both. I rolled my eyes when my mother suggested that I wear a MedicAlert bracelet (“They’ve gotten much more fashionable!”). But underneath the surliness, I couldn’t shake that nutritionist’s curse from years earlier. I was tired of eating baked chicken and boiled vegetables, tired of having to be careful all the time, tired of being broken. Shots hadn’t fixed me. Was I unfixable? Was I unfit to survive?

  This was the mid-1990s. It would be another ten years before a team of American psychologists ran a series of experiments on the neuropsychiatric effects of allergy, with grant support from the National Institute of Mental Health, NARSAD, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The scientists induced allergies to pollen and chicken egg in rats and mice. The test subjects were placed in an “open arena,” akin to releasing a human onto an empty basketball court, and their motions were tracked. With controls in place for physical activity, an animal’s confidence was measured by its willingness to venture into the center space. The allergy-ridden subjects chose to run along the walls of the arena, while normal creatures ventured out into the open.

  “Little Mouse” had been one teacher’s nickname for me in middle school, after she’d noticed I always ate bread from the inside out, nibbling my way around potentially egg-brushed crusts. The little mouse had grown into a teenager with an overdeveloped sense of mortality. I was an anxious creature, clinging to the walls of my arena.

  High-strung teenagers are no more rare than rebellious ones. But the X factor of my adolescence, the ingredient that threatened to turn the cocktail toxic, was Benadryl. Benadryl was my ostensible savior—the one thing that could stave off a reaction without requiring a trip to the hospital—and so we had it stashed everywhere. At least six pills in my purse; in my mother’s purse; in my locker; in the glove compartment of the car.

  The maximum safe dosage of Benadryl within a given day is 300 milligrams. More than that can trigger ringing in the ears, dilated pupils, flushing, fever, hallucinations, and seizure. The bright, friendly shade of pink associated with the brand belies its powerful effects. If you’ve taken one, you should not be driving. Diphenhydramine, after all, is not just the active ingredient in Benadryl. Known for inducing drowsiness, it is the active ingredient in sleeping aids like Nytol, Unisom gels, and Tylenol PM.

  Imagine a depressed housewife who is trying to shut out the siren call of sleeping pills. Now imagine she finds sleeping pills tucked in every pocket, every corner of the house, and even the penny dish by the front door. Imagine her husband reminding her before she leaves for the library or the movies or the grocery store: “Hey, do you have your sleeping pills with you? Do you need extra? Maybe you should pack a few extra.”

  Sometimes my friends would joke that if we ever decided to kill ourselves, I had the tastiest options by far. “Death by chocolate!” they exclaimed. “Death by ice cream!” It certainly would be easy. I can walk into any typical kitchen and find at least fifteen things that would kill me if I ate them, and that’s without even looking under the sink for the drain cleaner.

  Yet to anyone who has ever had a severe allergic reaction—the numb lips, the swollen throat, the frantic swallowing for air, the churning cramps—the idea that you would volunteer for that sensation is idiotic. Forget the allure of something sugary. No one wants to be drowning in their own spit as they die.

  Benadryl was different. I knew what it tasted like (nothing at all), how easily one went down, how quickly another four or five could go down, how it made my eyelids sweetly heavy within a half hour. To an anxious and sleep-starved teenager attending a high-pressure high school, that didn’t sound like such a bad way to go. At times that sounded like heaven.

  One night I was hiding out in my room, moping and listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged. My parents were fighting. A boy I liked didn’t like me back. I had a ten-page paper due the next day that I had not even started. I emptied my purse, rooted through my underwear drawer, reached into the sliding cubby of my headboard, unpeeled each individual blister casing, and lined up every capsule I had: fourteen Benadryl, and I hadn’t even raided the upstairs. I looked at them for a long time. Then I burst into tears, hit the stop button on my boom box, and walked out to the living room. My mother, inured to the teenage temperament at this point, didn’t ask questions. We sat on the couch together and watched the eleven o’clock news.

  I used to wonder if I was the only one tempted to overdose. As I grew older and began meeting other people with allergies, we would crack wise on our membership in the cult of Benadryl carriers. There is no diplomatic way of asking, “So, did you ever think about taking a whole handful at once?”

  Only as the world has become Googlable do I find them out there: The high school basketball player who died with a mixture of Benadryl and rubbing alcohol in his stomach. A paper on “pediatric intravenous catheter abuse,” published after a child with long-term illness drained the powder from Benadryl capsules into her IV. And I wonder how many other kids, afraid they will always be at odds with the rest of the world, take a Benadryl or maybe two or maybe three—only to have nothing worse come of it than cotton mouth and a hellishly difficult time getting up for school the next morning.

  That night, my mom went to bed after the news, but I stayed up to watch the Tonight Show. After the Tonight Show I watched the Late Show. Then the even later show. Then an infomercial starring Cher. Finally the station showed the American flag waving, while playing a prerecorded version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by the blare of off-air static. By then I could barely keep my eyes open. I returned to my room and crawled straight under the covers. The pills, which I’d lined up along the foot of my moon-and-stars bedspread, scattered onto the floor.

  • • •

  When I was younger, eating outside the house was a family affair. My mother knew my allergies better than I did, so she did the ordering. No matter how careful we were, there were dozens of evenings derailed by attacks: my mother breaking out the Benadryl, my father interrogating the chef, and—if pills didn’t work—driving to a hospital where we could hang out in the ER lobby until my airway opened up again.

  “Just breathe,” my father told me on one outing as I curled up in his lap, apologizing over and over for wasting our tickets to an art exhibit, a trip we had planned for weeks with my grandparents. “Calm down. Just breathe.”

  Even in high school, when friends took to dinner-and-movie nights, I stayed wedded to the three-person unit that managed what I ate and took care of me when something went wrong. In my parents’ absence I might order French fries, and there was one—one—Japanese restaurant near school where I could trust the vegetable and chicken tempura. But that was it. Nothing else was worth the risk.

  You can’t make it through college on four years of potatoes. So before I took up residence on the grounds of the University of Virginia, my parents arranged a meeting with a supervisor who shared the entire index of the recipes used in UVA’s cafeterias. “We’ll take care of her,” she promised.

  The reality was less promising. I’d venture to the dining hall and watch servers use tongs to pass out corn bread, then use t
hose same tongs to serve me an ear of corn. I’d look down at a plate now contaminated with buttermilk crumbs, shake my head, get a new plate, and start again. Theoretically, the university had pledged to my parents that Aramark would have a “safe protein” available at every dinner shift. The “safe protein” in question turned out to be completely unseasoned cod. Two slabs. Every time.

  Part of the problem was that the dining hall was open for three-hour stretches; neither the staff nor I knew when I would arrive from day to day. Sometimes no one had remembered to defrost the fish and fire the plate, meaning a twenty-minute wait before it could be ready (an eternity in college time). More often the dish had been nuked, cling-wrapped, and stashed under a heat lamp at least an hour before I arrived. As I peeled off the covering, a stream of fishy, lukewarm condensation would run onto my plastic tray. The flesh would be rubbery to the touch.

  “My god,” someone at the table would say. “What is that?”

  The day that broke me was when I walked in to hear a man in a plastic hairnet call back into the kitchen, “Yo, the fish girl’s here!”

  I took to dishing up white rice instead, ladled with chickpeas from the salad bar. But that worked only if I got to the salad bar before other students had contaminated the bins with drips of ranch dressing, which always seemed to slop out of the ladle as it was poured, or shreds of cheddar cheese. When that happened, my refuge was a bowl of dry Corn Pops. I had to suck on them before chewing so they didn’t scrape the roof of my mouth. My allergies took one of dorm life’s great culinary gifts—breakfast for dinner—and rendered it punitive.

  Facing these culinary disasters, I couldn’t resist taking a chance on the recipe du jour from time to time, asking first if it was Sandra-friendly. My first semester at school, on the first weekend my long-distance boyfriend came to visit, I was trying to impress him with how well I’d acclimated to being away from home. When he said the risotto looked good, I asked the server if it had any dairy in it. She assured me it didn’t. I got a heaping plateful.

  “They take good care of me here,” I bragged. I don’t know why I thought eating risotto would impress him. Maybe I was just afraid he wouldn’t kiss me if I had cod breath. If I’d known the very definition of risotto stipulates cheese stirred into the rice as it cooks, I wouldn’t have touched it. But I’d never heard of risotto. It looked like vegetables in rice, not that different from what I assembled myself via the salad bar.

  My tongue told another story. On the first bite, strands of cheese (which I realized was what I had seen stretching from rice to fork) formed a strychnine web across the back of my throat. I took a long sip of water, continuing my serene chatter about classes as I assessed the damage. My boyfriend knew better than to believe my calm.

  “Sandra?” he asked. “You okay?”

  This was how I learned that an ambulance squad can reach any building on UVA’s grounds in ten minutes, using paved shortcuts specifically designed for quick access. They came in with a wheelchair. Though my vision was blurring, and I felt woozy, I refused. I was not going to be seen being carted out of Newcomb Hall.

  “Just use the chair,” my boyfriend pleaded. But instead I marched out of the dining hall on my own feet, with my boyfriend and a four-person EMS crew behind me.

  “Slow down!” said the tech wheeling the chair.

  No way. I was hoping that if I walked fast enough, people would not realize they were there with me. In my mind, this was like some slow-motion Scorsese chase scene. Odds are that the tech was no more than a foot behind me, poised to catch me in case I collapsed backward.

  The sequence that followed was one that would become familiar in the four years to come: Landing in the waiting room of the University of Virginia hospital, with its drooping potted palms and out-of-date copies of Sports Illustrated. Getting a dirty look from the father of a six-year-old with a broken arm, who had been waiting for an hour, while I went straight in—potential anaphylaxis goes to the top of the triage list. Refusing an IV, because I dread the bruise, followed by a lecture on refusing IVs. Benadryl, Zyrtec, and hours of lonely, bored, not-allowed-to-fall-asleep waiting on an ER cot while my boyfriend, equally lonely and bored, waited in the lobby. A man on the other side of the curtain kept whimpering about his leg.

  The next time I went to the dining hall, they put out the plate of fish before I even had a chance to ask.

  I sometimes took the bus to Harris Teeter for groceries. But I had nowhere to keep food, nowhere to cook it, and no money to spend. Besides, for the first time in my life, staying in to eat was no protection from the reach of dairy. My roommate was a nice Montana girl who liked pizza. Sometimes she’d talk on the phone while eating a slice. If I used the same phone to make a call, even hours later, oil left on the receiver raised hives all along my chin and cheek.

  This led to an awkward lecture about keeping surfaces clean. In every dorm, someone gets stuck with the lame roommate assignment. Once you have uttered the phrase “baby wipes” to another eighteen-year-old, face it: you are that lame roommate.

  Whenever my mother heard about these reactions, she was furious on my behalf. One morning, I explained I had missed her phone call the night before because I’d been inadvertently exiled from our suite, when my roommate popped buttered popcorn in the microwave next to my bed. She told me to be more assertive. “This is a matter of life and death,” she said. “They have to understand that.”

  But I wanted so badly to be something other than the fussy one. Four years of college and countless reactions never quashed the dream that I could be just another UVA ’Hoo, in all her sloppy glory.

  At a postgraduation beach week, my drunken housemates decided to turn beer pong into “White Russian pong,” sending a spray of milk and Kahlúa into the air every time someone plunked a Ping-Pong ball into a Solo cup. I didn’t object. I stood by, cheering for a team, not touching anything, hoping for the best.

  After an hour, so much milk had been splashed about that I started to react. On autopilot, I ordered my boyfriend to drive to a nearby ER, where I hung out in the lobby, waiting for the Benadryl to work. He settled in and watched cable TV. I lay down on a scratchy couch nearby, stared at the ceiling, and tried to relax.

  I didn’t fit in anyone’s lap anymore. No one knew to say “Breathe. Just breathe.” The protective bubble of life with my family had burst, and I was on my own.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Eat, Drink, and Be Wary

  Rituals mark every life. Traditions and celebrations affirm membership in a group or provide comfort in daily repetition or declare passage from one stage to the next. Yet the reality is that my eighteenth birthday party didn’t make me an adult. Nor did graduating from college. Even when I moved into my first postcollege apartment, with my dad as a cosigner on the lease, I felt like a kid playing dress-up.

  But learning that my best friend Kristen was getting married finally dropped the anvil of adulthood on my head. Not just a best friend but the best friend—the one I’d had for ten years, who’d watched me cry over my high school sweetheart; the one with whom I shared an invented code consisting of the words bob, funk, derf, and, on special occasions, pampelmousse. How had the volunteer fireman our friends had teased Kristen about transmogrified into the future father of her children? Where did that leave me?

  That left me in a booth of St. Maarten Café, celebrating to the tune of “Another One Bites the Dust.” Four of us had gathered on a Friday night in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the Corner, the strip of bars we had frequented back as UVA undergrads. Not too froufrou, not too grimy, Maarten’s—as the students call it—is the kind of tavern where regular visits earn you a mug with your name inscribed on the bottom. Kristen liked to order the bananas Foster, complete with flaming ice cream. Eric and Dave preferred the loaded waffle fries, buried under a layer of melted cheese. I planned to do my part by getting a round of shots for all.

  While they deliberated about the food, I scrutinized the laminated place mat that doub
led as a drink menu, looking for something Sandra-friendly that didn’t contain Irish cream, Midori, or chocolate. The house specialties cater to someone who has the sweet tooth of a five-year-old and the sense of humor of a fifteen-year-old. No other explanation justifies the Buttery Nipple.

  “What about Lemon Drops?” I asked my friends. Vodka, with a sugar-rimmed glass and a wedge of lemon afterward. Sweet, simple, and wickedly effective. My parents had not raised a lightweight. As my mother had once said, “We’re just glad you can enjoy something fun.”

  When the waitress brought out a quartet of shot glasses, the vodka looked a little cloudy. But some bartenders add a squeeze of lemon, and I wasn’t going to make everyone wait while I asked questions. Rail vodka is drinkable only as long as it is ice cold, and already our fingertips were melting away the frost on each small glass.

  “To Kristen and Fireman Bob!” we toasted.

  The next day I would call the bar and learn that what I had ordered was not a round of Lemon Drops but a round of St. Maarten’s Signature Lemon-Drop Shooters, in which the vodka is accented with a dash of sour mix. Commercial drink mixes, as any student of chemistry or cheap margaritas might tell you, contain a boatload of ingredients that separate rather unappealingly over time. So a milk derivative is added as a binder. It may be way down there, fifteenth or sixteenth in the small print of ingredients, but it’s there.

  In that moment in Maarten’s, I knew none of this. What I knew, as soon as I set my drained shot glass back on the table, was that my esophagus was on fire. What on earth? Vodka, lemon, sugar: I wasn’t allergic to any of those things. What was I missing? Had the glass been dirty from someone else’s Buttery Nipple?