All I wanted to do was celebrate my first week of a temporary work assignment in Mexico with some delicious takeout. Instead, I ended up laying on a hospital bed squinting through swollen eyes to look at my Google Translate app.
Kelsey Butler after an allergy-related hospital visit. Photographer: Kelsey Butler
The culprit: peanuts, which I’ve been allergic to my entire life.
I’ll admit I let my guard down when it came to my dietary restrictions. That’s in part because my allergy symptoms were usually mild on the rare occasion I did accidentally ingest nuts: hives, an itchy tongue or slightly swollen lips at most.
This time was different: Within minutes my face began to blow up into something unrecognizable. I realized it wasn’t the Mexico City altitude that was making me short of breath as I wheezed more and more with each passing second. I also felt a burning sensation on my scalp and face, like I was on fire.
After a jab in the the thigh from my husband with an epinephrine auto-injector, I was able to breathe again. Ninety minutes and a $109 hospital bill later, I was pretty much myself again, just puffier. (I can’t even imagine how much time and money this would have cost me had I been home in New Jersey.)
Unsettled by the experience, I set off to find out why this reaction to peanuts was so outside my norm and what I — and the 33 million other Americans with food allergies — should be doing when traveling.
Zachary Rubin, an allergist in the suburbs of Chicago, set me straight on the first point right away.
“Food allergy is a disease, it’s not a lifestyle or a fad diet,” he says. “A food allergy is not something that you’d say: ‘I have a mild food allergy or a severe food allergy.’ You either have it or you don’t.”
Reactions can be “mild, moderate, severe or potentially life-threatening, but you can’t necessarily predict the next time you accidentally ingest something” which of those it will be, he says.
My physical state and the environment may have played a part in my ordeal. I was fatigued after traveling, adapting to a new schedule and Mexico had recently seen scorching temperatures.
For this and future trips, I’ll be taking the advice of experts, such as Inderpal Randhawa, founder of the Food Allergy Institute in Long Beach, California, who says preparation is key. That can mean printing out cards with your allergies listed in the language of your travel destination to give to servers at restaurants.
He also recommends consulting a doctor about carrying a “full anaphylaxis kit,” which may include auto-injectors like an EpiPen and other medications like antihistamines or steroids. If it’s a long trip or you’re traveling someplace where auto-injectors aren’t available, like Mexico, you may want to pack extras.
Finally, make sure you discuss your allergens, symptoms and game plan with your travel partner.
Communication is key. I’ve now mastered asking “¿Esto tiene cacahuates?” — Does this have peanuts? — everywhere I go. No Google Translate needed. — Kelsey Butler
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