Good Reads Dont Kill the Birthday Girl

My first visit to the circus was well-nigh the terminal day of my life. I'd barely caught sight of the ringmaster when I started wheezing. Soon I couldn't take a deep breath and was being wheeled on a stretcher backstage past the clowns. Who knew that the circus animals would give me a most-fatal allergy assault?

Anaphylactic stupor, in which the whole body reacts to an allergen, is unforgettable: Your pharynx closes upwards; your lungs hunger for air; your fingernails turn blue. Medical personnel work at warp speed around you while your mind slows down. I recall noticing through the fog that they wrote my vitals in ink on the ER sheets just like on Television set.

While I tin can avoid dander and confined spaces with animals, Sandra Beasley cannot do without her body's worst enemy: food. Even a birthday political party is a challenge. Eating ice foam could make her throat swell, and being kissed by someone who'south eaten cake could exit hives on her cheek. The refrain at immature Sandra'due south parties was the oddly cheerful "Don't Kill the Birthday Girl" — the title of her honest and amusing medical memoir that'due south also a patient-written primer on food allergies. This birthday girl doesn't kvetch, though she has every correct to. She doesn't consider herself a victim, merely someone who has to experience the world differently from the rest of us.

Beasley, an award-winning poet, is allergic to a full carte of foods: "dairy (including goat's milk), egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine basics, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish, and mustard." At that place are 12 millionAmericans with nutrient allergies, with reactions that range from an annoying itch to anaphylactic stupor, the cause of expiry for 150 Americans each year. Beasley's allergies are so severe that her parents could have sought broad protections for her at school nether federal disability laws but chose not to.

Beasley diligently recounts the history and science of food allergies, but she's most engaging when she weaves in her own story. Born in 1980, she didn't benefit in early childhood from the increased sensation of food allergies that came in the 1990s — and she suffered frequent attacks. A mere gustation of a nutrient might make her vomit. "I grew up thinking in terms of not the reaction, but a reaction, perhaps as many as one a week," she writes.

'Don't Impale the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life' by Sandra Beasley. Crown. 229 pp. $23. (Crown/Crown)

As a young daughter in Northern Virginia, Sandra needed an developed-sized pocketbook to schlep her medicines, including her asthma inhaler, her antihistamine and her EpiPen, a device that allowed her to cocky-inject a life-saving shot of epinephrine. "Picture a kid in thick-lensed glasses, indigo-dark jeans [and] . . . a beglittered T-shirt," she writes. "Now add the purse of a thirty-two-year-old female parent, complete with pills, tissues, safety pins, and too many pennies."

When Beasley hit boyhood, she became neglectful of her status and was fifty-fifty rude toward her doctors. "I 'forgot' to use my daily inhalers," she writes. "When chided, I muttered, 'Information technology'south my body.' . . . I was insufferable. I was a teenager."

Food-allergic adults lead complicated lives. Getting ready to get out, Beasley applied makeup wondering if subsequently in the evening an allergic reaction might brand her eyes swell. "I glaze my lips in Chapstick," she writes, "not knowing if I'll end up with a kiss or mouth-to-rima oris from a fifty-three-twelvemonth-old paramedic with halitosis."

We root for Beasley when she is on a date with a sympathetic guy who waited outside the bathroom equally she vomited from an allergy attack. "Sandra," he told her, "You take to sympathize. I couldn't film explaining to your mom that I let you dice lone — and on a toilet."

Her memoir just munches on the nutrient allergen that has received entree-sized media and customs attending: peanuts. Peanut-free zones abound in schools, baseball stadiums and airplanes. Peanut-sniffing dogs are bachelor for the seriously allergic. Those of us with peanut-allergic relatives appreciate the business organization. Only Beasley isn't a peanut-allergy advocate: She'south not allergic to them. Besides, peanuts are just one of the eight foods that cause more 90 pct of U.S. allergies: The listing also includes milk, eggs, tree basics, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat.

And Beasley questions all the well-intentioned focus on peanuts: "But what if every one of the 'big eight' allergen contingents demanded the same courtesy, every fourth dimension? . . . Why is a generation of children existence raised under the conventionalities that it takes a village to avoid a peanut?"

Despite all her challenges, Beasley lives with gusto, not fear. "My job is to heart on staying safe in this world, but my job is likewise never to assume the globe should revolve effectually keeping me safe," she writes. "Nosotros have more important things to worry about. Don't kill the birthday girl. The gifts are wrapped and the pinata waiting. We have a party to get to."

Suzanne Allard Levingston is a freelance journalist based in Bethesda.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/dont-kill-the-birthday-girl-by-sandra-beasley/2011/06/21/gIQAv7NSSI_story.html

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