My Scary Day

Yesterday started like any other day, I posted on the blog and decided to make breakfast. I was making a crustless broccoli quiche something I’ve made dozens of times because its perfect to reheat throughout the week. Typically I make it with turkey bacon or ham or just veggies but I had sausage links in the freezer so I thought sausage might be just as good.

These weren’t regular sausages; they were “healthy” sausages. Publix GreenWise Sausage Links or veggie sausage, you know…not really meat but soy. Much lower in fat and cholesterol I thought these would be a great addition to my healthy lifestyle. Apparently my body had other ideas.

The other ingredients were common foods I eat all of the time; eggs, broccoli, onion, celery, cottage cheese, low fat cheddar cheese. I had coffee. I had no exposure to anything else. The only new food was the Publix Green Wise Sausage so I’m guessing it was the cause of my scary day. I put four links cut up into small pieces and in my slice of quiche there were probably about four pieces, I had three and spilt a little morsel of egg and sausage between Sadie and Max. I would say in total I had about 2/3 of one link.

After breakfast I had several phone calls to make and then I was going to go out and run a few errands. While I was on the first phone call, I just didn’t feel right. As I talked, I felt like my tongue was getting very heavy. By the time I hung up the phone, my breathing was starting to feel labored and my throat felt like it was closing. I recognized the symptoms of an allergic reaction and quickly headed to the bathroom medicine cabinet where I knew we had Benadryl. I quickly opened the package and took two pills from their protective foil packaging breaking one in half as I did and as I tilted my head back to swallow them down I caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. HOLY.CRAP. My face looked like botox gone horribly wrong. My lips were enormous and while I always thought my upper lip could use a bit of fullness my lips looked like several bees attacked them. My eyes were huge, my face round as a balloon and my nose…wow, my nose looked like I had just gone 10 rounds with a heavyweight champion. This was bad, this was serious and in the back of my head all I could think about was the fact that I couldn’t call 911 because we don’t have health insurance yet. How stupid is that? Just another indicator of how far we’ve fallen. My sister the nurse already told me she would have taken me to the hospital she works at that is nonprofit where they don’t refuse people without insurance.

In retrospect the fear and panic was probably a good thing. They probably pumped a lot of much needed adrenaline into my system. In retrospect I wish I would have taken photos of my huge lips and balloon like face to share with you LOL.

Within about 10 minutes the Benadryl started to work, with each breath I could feel the air reaching deeper into my lungs. I’m thinking it was probably a good thing that one of those tablets broke in half, it probably allowed the medication to break down that much faster.

The rest of the afternoon wasn’t pleasant with the various symptoms but my sister stayed with me until 1:30 when she had to leave to go to work. I don’t even remember calling for her. I think the most remarkable thing I noticed was how Max and Sadie reacted. They knew something was wrong before I did and once I started to panic, Max followed me around and stayed with me until I was better when I felt lightheaded, he was right there next to me on the sofa, licking my face.

I’ve never had such a severe reaction to food before, I’ve had soy burgers before without incident but perhaps there was something in the sausage that I’m allergic to? I won’t be eating more to find out. I should note that my sister enjoyed a piece of quiche and had no allergic reaction. I won’t be trying the greenwise veggie products again because I have no way of knowing which ingredient caused the allergic reaction.

All I can say is, if you ever have symptoms of severe allergic reaction take action quickly and call emergency services. Severe allergic reaction can result in death. I was very very lucky. My reaction was bad but at least I didn't go into shock and /or cardiac arrest.