#cornaggedon

Okay. So I’ve been waiting to post about my current health stuff until I felt like I had something concrete, and hoo boy, have I got something now. (This is gonna be a long post.) I have a newfound allergy to corn, and it’s taking over my life.

I’d been tested for food sensitivities years ago and had been removing some of the offending foods from my diet slowly, but I’d not paid attention to corn. It’s in most gluten free products (and gluten was the first to go), it doesn’t have to be labeled as an allergen, and you basically have to learn a new language to figure out where it is in everything. And I had been eating plenty of it in really obvious forms like corn chips without issues.

But then I started an elimination diet in the middle of May with a focus on eliminating corn and corn derivatives in everything, and within about three days, I was having reactions. My first big reaction that was obviously to corn was when someone made popcorn at work—instantly it felt like my sinuses had been filled with cement, I got a searing headache, and my exhausted muscles felt like I’d gotten the flu. Those symptoms lasted three days. I’ve been working since then on different foods, figuring out what definitely has corn in it and what might have corn in it (read: everything. Every. Thing.). I’ve been avoiding more and more. Lots of small reactions along the way, but mostly just annoying ones. I was sick, but I could manage it.

I’ve got a solid set of things I can buy at the grocery store, so I’m not nearly as sensitive as some people to cross contamination or things like pesticides and/or washes on vegetables, but I have really specific brands I can eat and am largely making my own food from scratch—it’s healthy stuff, which is great, but it’s a lot of work, and I often eat the same thing every single day. (Lots of greens, roasted cauliflower, and one kind of canned chicken. Evidently it looks really good to people at work, but I’m going on a month of almost only this.)

But Monday. Monday I got to experience anaphylaxis. The night before, while breaking down boxes with a friend, I started having a mild skin reaction to maybe the cat hair we were stirring up, maybe the boxes themselves (remember, everything has corn in it, and evidently some boxes are basically sealed with corn starch). Also my tongue hurt, but it didn’t seem like a huge deal at the time, just another weird body thing that I didn’t like but could wait out. Woke up Monday morning, felt weird but not terrible, but over the subsequent six hours I developed an intermittent rash that was almost always itchy somewhere but moved (like hives lite), my eyes got so dry they were burning, and my lips were itchy and maybe a little swollen. It suddenly occurred to me that my tongue was swollen, which is why it hurt (not the other way around). I’d been trying to get back to sleep, since I was scheduled to work Monday night, but at 2 pm, it became very clear that I needed to at least be evaluated by someone. I had huge amounts of Benadryl in me with no effect, and I kept noticing (or re-evaluating) more symptoms.

So I reluctantly threw some pants on and put some safe, shelf stable food in a bag (since I didn’t know where this was going to end up) and drove my (massively anxious panicky) self to urgent care. (This was a bad decision. I should have gone to the emergency room. I got lucky. But it was dumb. It could have gotten worse really fast.) I didn’t have any emergent problems that needed treatment right away, and my vital signs were stable, so they sent me home with prescriptions for prednisone (hence the time of this post, probably) and epi pens. I now own epi pens.

I wasn’t sure if this allergy would ever progress to this stage, but I had figured that if it did, I had more time to prepare. Epi pens were on my list of things to pursue, but not at the top. I also didn’t know what my limits were on treating anaphylaxis in myself—it can be harder to be confident in a decision if the symptoms come on slowly, or if some of them are variants of my normal issues—especially as it related to emergency care like when to go to the emergency room. But the PA I saw at urgent care agreed that it was mild anaphylaxis. I’m seeing my doctor (again) Thursday to figure out what next steps I need to take, but yesterday was full of panic, crying, and being completely exhausted. It was scary. This is a game changer for how I relate to food, how I trial new foods, and how I function within the very corny world at large. I’m gonna have to be more disciplined with what foods I’m eating and how long I take to trial them, and I’m probably gonna have to work more on expensive things like compounding all my medications, probably seeking out a specialist of some kind (at least an allergist, maybe another), and lots of tests. I thought this was taking over my life before, but this is another level.

Post-anaphylaxis, I was wiped out but doing mostly okay. Tracking symptoms as they slowly improved, sleeping a lot. Now, a day and a half in, I’m ridiculously nauseous. It could be a side effect from prednisone—I mean, I took it yesterday morning with food, and the nausea hit in the middle of the night, so maybe?—but I could also be reacting to my safe foods. It could mean I’m losing foods, which is fairly common after experiencing anaphylaxis with this stupid corn allergy.