Sunday, June 1, 2008

Overdramatic much?


There is an interesting new article about how corn is in everything, My 3 Days Off Corn, online at http://wholelifetimes.com/2008/05/healthyliving0805.html . The author tries to go for 3 days without corn. (She doesn't realize it, but she has corn in the wax on her apple in the first thing she eats, and probably in the ethylene gas used to ripen her mango on her first day. But overall I'm impressed by her effort.) If you read the article, the rest of my post makes more sense.

My neighbor lent me the movie Game Plan (with The Rock and some cute kid from the Disney Chanel.) because 2 characters in it have food allergies. The Rock (BTW is his first name "The"?) has a mild allergy to cinnamon which is presented humorously, further on in the movie the kid has a life threating reaction to nuts.

The scene: The Rock makes a dramatic run to the hospital, where she is placed on on a gurney, swollen, gasping for breath, having an anaphylactic reaction. The doctors say "You are lucky you got here in time." She is wheeled off. Clearly she is going to live, not a lot of dramatic tension left. At this denouement, I burst into projectile tears.

Before this 3 hankie moment, I didn't realized how much subconscious stress I've been carrying around about this stupid allergy. Last week was a bad week. I managed to get poisoned 4 out of 7 days, 3 of them by corn proteins in the air, 1 by a safe food -- but I managed the reaction just fine. I have this fear about the reaction that I am not going to be able to manage. If I forget my Benadryl or the Epi-Pens don't work or there is just too much corn out there- that could be me not breathing any more. Some days I try to laugh it off, but deep down I want a bubble or to move to an island without corn.