Red #40

I'm allergic to red food coloring. Growing up the 'sweets' we had in the house were maple syrup, brown sugar, and honey. We had milk delivered to our door, my mom made her own Kiefer and lentil soup was a staple at the dinner table. Although I appreciate and enjoy eating healthy and living foods now, as a child I wanted nothing more than sticky sweets and bright colored candies. Any hard candy we ever saw came from the dentist (or my Papa, when he would visit). The manufacturers of these 'candies'  tried so hard to make up for the lack of sugar that the taste no longer resembled sweetness. I think they still sell these in the 'food for diabetics' aisle of the grocery store.

Any time I ate other food at a neighbor or friend's house, my mom knew immediately. My cheeks, which functioned as litmus paper, glowed red from the preservatives, high fructose corn syrup and most of all, the food coloring I had consumed earlier that day. "What did you eat?" she would ask me in a perplexed tone as if anything that made me react so violently had to be made of plastic or asbestos. "What? Oh, I dunno....I guess I ate a fruit roll up or something". It annoyed me that I couldn't hide this from her. There were usually several things I had eaten that I shouldn't have. Other days, I tried to pretend that my cheeks looked fine and "really, I didn't eat anything". I rubbed them in an attempt to turn them a normal color which was, of course, useless.

I find it amusing how many children are so oblivious to their parent's level of intellegence. I am including myself in this statistic. To veer on a little tangent, a boy I used to sit for once told me I "looked unexpected". Ryan thinks this is particularly insightful; so apparently not all 7 year old children see things the way I did.

In my early 20's I was convinced that like many adults, I had outgrown my childhood allergies. I keenly tested this theory by consuming maraschino cherry ice cream with my then roommate. Brilliant, right? I thought so too.

About an hour later, in the middle of L.L.Bean, I noticed that my stomach itched and then my throat was tight and then came the welts and the puffiness. I ignored it for a while (because heck, it might go away on its own) and then mentioned to the people I was with that we should probably find some drugs. I think I took antihistamines and those did nothing. I slept on it and when I woke up the next day, I could hardly breathe. At this point, I looked like a boxer that had just lost several matches...in a row (do boxers have matches or is that tennis?) The roommate drove me to the ER and I was seen shortly after that. I was going to skip over the part where the nurse looked at me and then my friend and asked what we needed, as if she wasn't sure which one of us was having issues, but really, it's a gem of a factoid.

This is where it starts to get good. I knew that I was afraid of needles because a couple of times in high school I tried to donate blood and passed out both times. My fellow student, who was running the pizza distribution table, actually yelled at me when I woke up. Apparently I was his first fainter. I laid back on the table as the nurse told me I needed steroids. I naïvely held out my had as though breathing wasn't that important and I could wait for pills to dissolve. Nope. Shots. I warned her I would probably faint and she assured me she would be gentle. Why do they say things like that? Don't they know it isn't about the pain? She gave me the shot and I passed out. I woke up with oxygen tubes in my nose and cold compresses on my head and then she yelled at me for fainting. Seriously? You couldn't have been more prepared!

Since then, other shots I've had I try and adequately prepare for. I have a system with my dentist where every time he needs to pull out a needle, I close my eyes and then stab my nail into my thumb and think about kittens. This has only not worked once when we were talking and he forgot to warn me. I was so startled that I swatted the needle from his hand and it flew across the room. It's a good thing the assistants stand at my head.

On another note, here are a few pics of things I've been embroidering. These needles don't seem to bother me as much.