All that Asthma and Nowhere to Go

There I was, after New England Swimming Championships my first year of college. Our meet was held at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut. After swimming for an entire weekend, and after not having eaten that day since 6 am (it was now 11 pm, and we were headed home to Wellesley College), I was starving. A teammate's mother had baked cookies, and we all dug in, ravenous. But the thing is, I'm allergic to nuts. However, the teammates mother had nicely separated the cookies into two bags--those with nuts and those without. I thought I was safe.

The second I bit into a cookie I knew it had nuts in it--pecans, it turned out. I only chewed a tiny bite--and then spit out most of it--but it was too late. I had ingested at least a little nut, my mouth was beginning to feel very odd, and I knew I had to throw up, immediately. Fortunately we were near a deli, so I ran in, used a heinous bathroom and became too intimately acquainted with the toilet bowl and the dirty cement floor. I gulped down benadryl and was about to get back on the bus with the team, when I realized that I was starting to feel itchy. And that I was wheezing--more and more. And most significant (and frightening) was the fact that my throat felt funny. I realized that I was having increasing trouble swallowing. I went back to the bathroom and looked at my throat in the mirror. It was bright red--and my uvula was about twice its normal size. I ran out of the bathroom in absolute fear and called my father, a doctor, who told me to go to the nearest emergency room immediately.

I was headed for anaphylactic shock. I rather feverishly asked the store owner where the nearest hospital was--it turned out to be right down the road. I stupidly got back on the bus, thinking that it would take just a minute to get there and that it would be faster than an ambulance.

The bus driver passed the ER entrance THREE times, before one of our co-captains screamed at him to get it right. He apparently didn't realize the seriousness of the situation, and I was too sick to speak. By that time, even though only minutes had gone by, I was throwing up constantly, I had hives everywhere on my body, I was having a full-blown asthma attack, and my throat was closing. I had never felt that ill, and I had never felt as if I had so little control over my health. My albuterol puffer sat there, thrown on top of my bag. Even it could not help my condition, and I was incredibly scared that I wouldn't be able to get the help I needed in this out of the way place, far from New York and the care I was used to.

Fortunately, there was an amazing ER doctor who apprized the situation immediately. I was wheeled into the ER, pumped full of steroids, and given oxygen. The epinephrine, the air--I was starting to feel like a human again. It's scary to think about this episode, but my life was saved.

Now I carry an epi-pen everywhere I go; I learned the hard way that allergies can get worse, as can asthma, and the two don't exactly make a winning couple.