Unlikely Words

Is this just me? Does anyone else have the experience of completely and baldly lying to yourself, and then totally buying into the lie, in some kind of vicious cycle of self-enablement?

Maybe I’m overselling this experience, since I’m talking about food. I’ll be sitting there on my couch, watching the Food Network, and I’ll see an interesting recipe. I’ll say to myself, “I should make that!” and instead of audibly scoffing at my own delusion, I’ll mark the TiVo episode as “save until I delete” so I can go back to that recipe later. Like homemade yogurt. Doesn’t that sound like the kind of think you’d like to have made?

“So what’d you do this weekend?”
“Made homemade yogurt.”
“Cool.”

It’s not just TV, of course; this happens on the internet. Food blogs are an excellent source of recipes I can over-ambitiously save. Like homemade ginger ale. Homemade ginger ale!

“Where’s this ginger ale from? It’s really good!”
“Yeah, I made that.”

Wouldn’t that be just awesome? Never going to happen, though.

But this isn’t a story about that. This is a story that starts with a recipe that actually did get made. This is a story about homemade granola bars. My little sister and I were talking about the overwhelming pile of old family photos that needed scanning and about how I’d never get it done on my own, and she offered to come visit for a weekend to help me get through them. “And,” she said, “we can totally bake those granola bars from ‘Good Eats.’”

Yes. Yes. We would scan, and we would bake our own granola bars. And then I could offer them to my friends, saying, “Want a granola bar? I made these.”

So she came to visit, and we scanned several hundred pictures in rough chronological order. We witnessed the photographic evidence of each Harvey sibling’s progress from adorable baby to adorable child to horrendously awkward adolescent to horrendously awkward post-adolescent to, you know, jaw-droppingly attractive adult.

And then we made granola bars. My sister and her girlfriend offered to go to the grocery store, and they came back with almost everything we needed (impressively navigating the bulk dried foods section of an unfamiliar grocery store). We didn’t, it turned out, have enough almonds. “No problem,” we said, “we’ll just see what we have in the pantry…peanuts! We’ll use peanuts.” Obviously a peanut is too large a nut (or more precisely, legume) to fit comfortably in a relatively thin granola bar, so we lightly crushed the peanuts in a mortar and pestle.

Here’s where things fell apart. She was stirring something into something else and I decided to start doing a little cleanup. I started to wash the mortar (or possibly the pestle - whichever one is the bowl) when I noticed that the fingertips on my left hand started to feel weirdly…tingly.

“I wonder why my fingers are tingling,” I thought to myself. “I wonder if it’s the peanuts.” To test this theory, I took a peanut out of the jar and popped it into my mouth. For science, I decided not to chew it, but rather just let it sit in my mouth and see what would happen. What happened was this: first my tongue and cheeks went numb, then I spit the peanut out, and then I freaked out like a little tiny girl.

This commenced about 36 hours wherein I panicked every time I put something in my mouth. “Oh my God, what if this soup has peanut in it? I can feel my throat constricting! Do you think there’re peanuts in these noodles? What about the broccoli?”

Luckily for those who have to deal with me on a more-or-less daily basis, my primary care physician referred me to an allergist pretty much instantaneously. My first appointment with Dr. Weisman was, well, underwhelming. I decided to walk to his office, since it’s about two blocks away from our house, which I suppose constitutes some minor aerobic activity. Then when the nurse called me in she kind of jogged up the stairs ahead of me, so I jogged after her. Long story short, when they took my pulse my heart rate was around 150. The doctor looked at me and said, “Are you in that bad of shape?” and a little part of my pride died that day.

The good doctor wrote down my story, said, “You might be allergic to peanuts,” (which, let’s be honest, I had figured out even without a fancy medical degree) and then described his diagnostic plan.

Step one: a blood test. Apparently there’s a blood test they can do for allergies. I don’t have any idea what they’re looking for. Some kind of peanut antibody? I don’t know. He may even have told me, but as soon as he said blood test most of my sensory organs shut down in panic. I don’t like needles. I really don’t like needles, and I’m way past the age where it’s cute or even acceptable to be as freaked out by needles as I am. What makes it worse is that now I’m old enough that I have to take myself to get the blood test voluntarily; I can’t rely on someone to drag me there.

My blood was drawn by a gentleman I refer to as the phlegmatic phlebotomist. (Yes, I’m proud of that alliteration, and you would be, too.) He responded with a shrug and a “whatever you want to do” when I told him that I’m bad with needles and that I’d like to try to read my book in an attempt to distract myself while he did his dirty work. I did annoy him, though, when I told him to wait and took my left arm back (after he’d already tied the rubber thing around my bicep) in order to turn the page.

Worst part over, to be sure, but I still had to wait the two weeks until my next allergist appointment to find out the results. This wouldn’t have been all that bad except for two things. I was now carrying around an Epi-Pen and still avoiding peanuts as though they were poison, and I had to start obsessing about step two in Dr. Weisman’s diagnostic strategy: the skin test.

I was in a no-win situation. If the blood work came back positive, then, crap, I’m allergic to peanuts. If it came back negative, then to be safe he was going to move on to the skin prick test. I didn’t know what it entailed, but I had a feeling it involved my skin, and something pricking it, and see above in regards to my feelings about needles.

The blood test came back negative. (Actually, apparently they first mistakenly did a test for a pea allergy, but luckily there was enough blood left over to do the peanut test without my having to go back in to give more. I am also not allergic to peas.)

You will all be relieved to know that the skin prick test involves a tiny plastic tube with these adorable little plastic spikes on the end. It itched like hell when they gave me the pure histamine one (as a control), but it didn’t hurt at all. I was so brave!

The skin test also produced negative results. I tested negative for allergies to peanuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, coconuts, and three other things that end with the word “nut.”

Now that I had two negative test results, Dr. Weisman told me it didn’t look like I was allergic, but there was still a chance. He said I basically had two choices. “You can not eat peanuts anymore, or you can come in and do a Peanut Challenge.”

A Peanut Challenge. Aw, hell yeah I want to take the Peanut Challenge. Just me and the peanut, mano a mano. Bring it on, Mr. Peanut. I’ll knock that monocle right off your smirking face.

It turns out the peanut challenge works like this: I go into the doctor’s office, and they feed me a peanut.

Ok, there’s slightly more to it than that. They carefully weigh out some amount of peanut (on, believe it or not, a postal scale) and have me eat it under controlled circumstances while standing by with an Epi-Pen just in case. That’s pretty much the extent of it.

The best part? The doctor’s last instructions to me. “When you come back in a month for the challenge, bring some peanut butter.” That’s right, this Peanut Challenge is BYOP.

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