“Every time I have a reaction, I have less time until I could possibly die.”
Sophomore Lydia Bauler says it so matter-of-factly, as if it no longer fazes her. She keeps her bare hands in her lap to avoid accidentally brushing the couch. She hardly touches anything without gloves anymore.
Coming in contact with any of the foods, or even just oils, on her growing list of allergies—nuts, seafood, shellfish, bananas, mangos and legumes—can set off a deadly chain reaction.
First, the hives start appearing, but other people usually notice them before she does. Then comes the pain in her stomach.
“The blood is rushing to all my vital organs,” she said. “It’s almost like a burning feeling because it’s so hot with all the blood. Then my limbs get really purple.”
Her last reaction, which happened at school in late October after she ate in the cafeteria, was the most painful.
“It seems like it’s getting worse,” Bauler said. “That’s why we take a lot of preventative measures, to preserve my quality of life.
Eventually I’ll just go into complete shock and shut down and begin to die, instead of a longer, gradual shut down.”
Food allergies are considered more severe than inhalant allergies, like trees and grasses, because the reactions change each time.
“Food allergies are life-threatening,” Tricia Crane, medical assistant at Dr. Safadi’s Findlay Allergy branch, said. “The first reaction might not be as bad as the second reaction, and the reactions get worse as they go.”
Bauler first developed her allergies in seventh grade, after years of eating the foods she’s now allergic to. She used to eat a peanut butter sandwich every day, and now she can’t touch one.
“There’s a chance I can develop more (allergies),” Bauler said. “They think I might be idiopathic, which means that I can react without any rhyme or reason.
“So someday I could randomly react to something that I’ve never reacted to before, or I could touch something and not react as much.”
With the possibility of a reaction happening any time, Bauler’s mother, Katie, has reason to fear for her.
“It’s a lot to worry about,” Katie Bauler said. “I don’t think we understood the severity when they first told us. After she had a couple other episodes because we weren’t careful enough, we realized with every episode it was going to get more severe.”
While Lydia Bauler has been battling severe reactions for the past three years, sophomore Amanda Reynolds has been dealing with her food allergies her whole life.
When she was only six months old, Reynolds’ parents took her to the doctor because she was spitting up blood, caused by an ulcer in her esophagus.
Reynolds reacts strongly to dairy products, breaking out in hives and swelling just by touching them, and is also allergic to peanuts, eggs, cranberries and mushrooms.
“Essentially my body thinks that the food is a disease or a foreign object and it wants to fight it off like an infection,” she said. “It reacts by trying to take care of itself.”
There was a chance, however, that the allergies Reynolds was diagnosed with could disappear as she grew.
“In some cases when babies are diagnosed with an egg or milk allergy, those will go away at an 80 percent chance,” Crane said. “But if they were diagnosed with a peanut allergy, chances are they will never go away.”
Though the allergies were worse when she was younger, Reynolds still has reactions. Unfortunately, there isn’t a cure for these, according to Crane; the only way to prevent reactions is to avoid the food you’re allergic to.
“Once you get used to it, you know what you can have and can’t have,” Reynolds said. “I pack my lunch almost every day for school, and never buy in the cafeteria.
“It’s really hard to know the ingredients of everything in the cafeteria, and it just makes it easier if I pack and know what I’m eating.”
When reactions do occur, both Lydia Bauler and Reynolds use what’s known as an EpiPen, a medical device that injects epinephrine, which stops the reaction.
Both students carry one with them.
“Once I use the EpiPens, I usually only have 20 minutes where they’ll really do anything,” Lydia Bauler said. “Once they wear off they’re kind of useless.”
Other allergy medicines, like Benedryll, can be administered, but Lydia Bauler must go to the hospital every time she has a reaction.
“Surprisingly I don’t really panic,” she said. “Last time was a lot more painful, though, so that kind of freaked me out. That was probably the first time I’ve ever been a little panicky.”
Reynolds is also frightened sometimes when her throat swells and it’s hard to breath, but she’s learned from experience to stay calm because she has her EpiPen.
“There’s a momentary panic when you’re not sure what’s going to happen,” Reynolds said, “but all of it usually ends up working itself out in the end, and you’re not scared once you realize you have what you need to take care of yourself.”