Dairy, egg, soy, beef, shrimp, pine nuts, cucumbers, cantaloupe, honeydew, mango, macadamias, pistachios, cashews, swordfish, mustard, mould, dust, grass, tree pollen, cigarette smoke, dogs, rabbits, horses and wool.
That's a laundry list of Sandra Beasley’s allergies, one the author has spent years dodging through treacherous dates, dinner parties and holiday feasts, and now details in a new memoir, Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life.
There were the near-weekly birthday parties at school, where she wolfed down hazelnuts safely stored in a classroom supply closet while the other children enjoyed cupcakes. During a “much-anticipated pizza party,” little Sandra retreated to the library.
“That’s not somebody designed to survive, now, is it?” snorted a nutritionist who visited Ms. Beasley’s Grade 4 class days later.
In Grade 9, the author ducked a spin-the-bottle kiss; the boy had just gobbled some M&Ms. In college, some dubious hummus on a dinner date sent her running her fingertips over her cheeks, “hoping it looked like a flirtatious gesture as I felt for radiant heat or hives.” (The date ends in an ambulance.)
Beyond telling her own story, the author traces the historical, cultural and scientific topography of allergies. In Canada, about 2.5 million people suffer from a significant food allergy, according to a 2010 report in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The next peanuts? Corn and sesame, experts suggest.
Ms. Beasley spoke with The Globe and Mail from Washington about her allergies and the persistent chorus of deniers who deem the rise in sufferers an “inflated product of the yuppie imagination.”
As a severe allergy sufferer, you write that you felt “like a kid playing dress-up.”
When you have food allergies as a child, you do cultivate a hyper-awareness of the world. Parents of children with food allergies tend to raise very intelligent, responsible and mature little kids. The downside is that you can feel a burden that’s out of proportion to what we think of as the pleasures of playful childhood. I never went into a birthday party as a kid without worrying because I knew that it was going to be a series of land mines.
Many of your anecdotes revolve around food at rituals, which become rituals of exclusion for you.
Food is key to a lot of community rituals, everything from taking communion to holidays such as Thanksgiving. When people come together to share food and one person not only cannot share that food, but the act of it being shared by others might bring danger to them, in the sense of not being able to get kisses at the end of the night or pass a plate as it goes around the table, it’s tough. The flipside of that is when your community adapts to whatever your need is: That can be a tremendously welcoming thing. I have been to Christmas dinner where the entire household opted to serve only things that I could eat. That is truly a gift. The best gestures are voluntary and spontaneous.
Which was the worst incident for you?
The worst is when it’s something really important to me and my ability to take part gets cut off by a reaction. The weddings, the vacations where we had to cut short a trip with the family; those are the worst because the physical discomfort of the reaction is paired with the guilt of having everybody forced to switch their focus to taking care of me instead of enjoying the moment.
As an adult, you write about never being “entirely swept up in the moment” romantically: “I have to be meticulous about the other person’s hygiene, at the risk of feeling less like a lover and more like a mom.”
