Imagine you’ve just had a baby. You’re a new parent and this is your first born child. You barely know what you’re doing and almost all the information you’ve ever read about being a new parent is tossed out the window. You are definitely laughing at your younger self for ever thinking parenting would be easy and that your child would be a perfect, happy angel 24/7. But despite the hardships, you still would die for this tiny human that you just birthed.
Now imagine that you’ve had this baby for a year and a half. You’ve been slowly introducing new foods to your baby bit by bit and the baby’s been fine with all of them. Then one day, you go to the store – be it Wal-mart, King Soopers, Costco, etc. – and they’re giving out free samples. One of these free samples, however, has peanut. You think it will be fine if you give this to your child. After all, you’ve given this child peanut before and nothing bad has happened. Your child takes a nibble of the food and something hapens that you did not expect. Your baby starts vomiting up the food and you rush out of the store to tend to your sick child. You spend several days wondering what’s wrong with the kid. “Is my child sick? Can I give my child Benadryl? Why’s my child turning blue? Why won’t my child respond to me?”
Finally, after much freting, you rush to the hospital and they tend to your child. A nurse comes out and chastises you. Your child has had a severe allergic reaction to something that they ate that sent them into anaphylaxis. The doctors test your child for the eight main allergens and a few more and they test postive for a severe peanut allergy.
Now fast foward a few years to a time that the child can remember. Switch to the child’s P.O.V. You have been tested and tested for peanut/tree nut allergies for 2-3 years with the same results. You don’t remember much, but you remember the feeling of the nurse cleaning your back with an alchol swab and a felt-tip pen tracing a tic-tac-toe grid of death on your back before the itching and burning starts. It’s painful. You want so desperately to scratch it. Whatever is causing it, you want it off. You’re screaming and crying. You regret letting your mom lead you into the hospital building. The nurse lets this continue for a while before finally cleaning it off and giving you some sort of medicine that makes the itching go away. You slowly stop crying and soon you’re back in the car, driving back home. This is your last skin test for allergens. While you don’t remember this, your mom will later tell you in your teen years that the nurse administering the proteins onto your skin administered too much of the peanut’s proteins and almost killed you in the process.
From then on, you never have another skin test, but your parents do everything they can to keep you safe. You’re told not to touch anything and not to put your hands in your mouth; always wipe them off with a diaper wipe (antiseptics like Germ-X won’t get rid of the peanut protiens). Your dad always wipes down the shopping cart at the store to make sure that it’s safe for you to touch. You always have to ask the other kids on the playground if they’ve had anything with peanuts or tree nuts before playing with them. Don’t hug or play with anyone if they’ve said they have had those things. You can’t go to many restaurants. Public schools are a non-starter since not many people are prepared to deal with your allergy.
You watch as your parents lay out towels at the front walkway for your grandparents to step on to take off their shoes. They’re sympathetic and definitely love you, but don’t understand the extent of your allergy completely. Other family members – though some of them have allergies too – still don’t understand either.
Halloween rolls around and your parents get you your own bag of candy so you don’t feel left out. Your dad carries your bucket to go trick-or-treating with you and gives the unsafe candy to his co-workers.
And don’t even talk about going to church. Most of the ones your parents have contacted won’t respond. You’re a liability to them. You’re the worst case any doctor at your local children’s hospital has ever seen. You will have a reaction if peanut gets on your skin that forms hives that looks like second degree burns. If you eat it, you will die. Your friend can’t even open a Snickers bar next to you, much less in the same room as you because you could have an airborne reaction. When you’re old enough to date, kissing your partner could kill you if they’ve had peanuts or peanut-related-products within the last 24-48 hours. Your parents tell you you’ll either have to find someone with the same allergy or they better have a thorough understanding of your allergy in order to date you, much less marry you.
You carry an Epi-pen with you everywhere you go. You hold your breath when walking through the nut-butter aisle and baking aisle at the store just to be safe. You have often felt as you got older that you’re a burden to your parents and other people who try to accomodate you because of how much they do to try to keep you safe (though this is just bad head-talk).
If you think this seems very personal, that’s because it is. While I have kept the child in this story ambiguous up until now, this child is me. I was the baby that ate the free sample. I should’ve died in any one of those days where I sat lethargic, my lips turning blue from lack of oxygen. Since then I have only had one topical reaction that resulted in a hospital visit and several close calls, the most recent one involving a winter camp where I had to eat freezedried Mountain House meals because we (my dad and I) found out last minute that half the food there was processed with peanuts.
At this point, you might be wondering why I’m writing this blog. Usually, the content here on the Tanuki Corner is about books, media, social trends, etc. I decided to write this blog after reading an article from the Daily Wire on Sunday about how actress Riley Keough was about to film a scene where she had to kiss Andrew Garfield but had eaten a granola bar with peanuts in it which resulted in the set having to be shut down for 24 hours before they could film the scene. Apparently, Andrew Garfield also has anaphylaxis to peanuts and after reading this, I scrolled to the comments section to see if there was anyone else talking about their experiences perhaps dealing with a similar allergy. Instead of finding this, I found that most of the comments were quite negative or at least very, very naive concerning peanut allergies. One comment said that if Garfield was a real man, he would’ve still kissed her even after she had eaten the granola bar. It was that comment that made me immediately want to share my experience so that hopefully I can shed some light on why this is something thats not to be taken lightly.
1 in 50 children have a peanut allergy and 1 in 5 will become anaphylactic to it ( https://www.slhd.nsw.gov.au/rpa/allergy/resources/allergy/peanutallergy.pdf). Only 20% will outgrow it in adulthood. With these numbers showing how common it is, it might be hard to believe that this community is ostracized and a negative stigma is often assigned to them, but unfortunately society doesn’t understand the severity of peanut/tree nut allergies and will go with what people in Hollywood have told them about it.
Hollywood has pushed the idea for years that people with peanut/tree nut allergies are shy introverts who are often bullied and are an annoyance. While the often bullied part is true, we are by no means an annoyance (or at least don’t intend to be an annoyance) and are often quite outspoken because we have to be for our survival. Hollywood has also pushed the false idea for years that the Epi-pen is a cure-all to an anaphylactic reaction when that isn’t even close to the truth. For those of you who don’t know, an Epi-pen is essentially adrenaline in a can. It delivers the drug epinephrine and its job is to keep you alive long enough for the paramedics to get to you by keeping your heart beating and airways open. It will not get rid of the swelling caused by a reaction (looking at you Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs). In 2018, the movie Peter Rabbit was boycotted by parents because it featured a scene where Mr. McGregor (who’s anaphylactic to blackberries) is shot at with his allergen by Peter and friends, starts choking and stabs himself in the thigh with an Epi-pen, which magically cures him. It got to a point where The Kids with Food Allergies Foundation (part of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America) issued a warning about the movie and sent a letter to Sony about the misrepresentation of food allergies and anaphylaxis (you can read the full article here: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/02/peter-rabbit-food-allergies-sony#:~:text=The%20new%20movie%2C%20Peter%20Rabbit,and%20the%20use%20of%20epinephrine.). Sony then issued a statement apologizing about it and while I’m not usually a fan of people forcing companies to apologize for things, in this case where it makes fun of kids with this – I guess it could be called this – disease that can kill them, then they should apologize, especially since there are so many memes like this circulating on the internet already:
Peanut allergies are nothing to laugh at and need to be taken seriously. It angers and saddens me to see stuff like this circulating on the Internet. While it is important to be able to laugh and have a sense of humor around things, when people are making it seem like no big deal when it could in fact kill you, then there’s a line that needs to be drawn. I hope you have learned something from this post and if you have any questions about peanut/tree nut allergies, drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them in another article. If you also have a food allergy, there’s no shame in that, no matter what society tells you. Share this with as many people as you can so that together we can help spread awareness about this.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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