Yeah, my sister got it 25 years ago before anyone knew about it. She had an allergist tell her it was all in her head when she told him the hives showed up about 5 hours after eating meat. Most food allergies are pretty much instantaneous.
Man I don't get doctors that just dismiss something they've never heard of. They could be discovering a new condition and potentially pioneer helping millions of people if only they paid attention to their patients.
In 2018 & 2019 I got a couple of bad chest infections. Lost my smell then taste then they started coming back intermittently with odd metallic or rotting scents and weird tastes in food. Went to a neurologist who basically told me taste and smell don’t work the way I described. I’m sorry we all had to go through a pandemic and the outcome wasn’t worth the expense obviously, but regardless, the vindication I felt from the entire planet pointing out how very wrong that guy was gave me a small glimmer of satisfaction in those days.
I went to an ENT doctor and told him I had lost my sense of smell after Covid. He stood there and told me he had never heard of that as a result of Covid. I said, well, now you have, haven’t you? 😡
The brain’s a tricky thing and makes people experience somatic symptoms all the time. It’s always best practice to take a patient seriously of course but I imagine doctors encounter this kind of thing all the time and are used to referring people out to mental health care.
I expect for every discovery there'd be tens or hundreds of people claiming things that are unconnected, born by hypochondriac imagination, hallucinated, produced by delusions, faked as pranks or for some gains. Dismissing them is probably wrong but hoping to stick your name to a new disease is too optimistic.
I have a cousin who works as a biologist for the Florida Wildlife Commission and a huge percent of their field biologists have Alpha Gal because they work outside. It sucks. It definitely seems fake when you first hear about though.
My Realtor friends who show and sell land are susceptible to this. I know about 7 people with it. Some have reactions after eating it, but some can’t even be in the same room when it’s being cooked.
Mammalian meat is the same thing as red meat. People with alpha gal (when you get a red meat allergy after a tick bite) can't eat red meat, but can still eat chicken/turkey/other poultry.
I was SEVERELY ALLERGIC to mosquito bites in 2018. Never before - never after that. Just one summer of manic repellent applying.
Every bite was like a football size.
I live in southern Europe and there's a lot of them so I was quite scared of the neck bite or something, but sure enough lasted only one summer. I'm still scared it will come back randomly too 🙄
I have a condition (mast cell activation syndrome) where this happens all the time.
One time I was out eating sushi and had an anaphylactic reaction to prawns. I’d eaten prawns 2 days prior and was fine. Then a few months later, I accidentally ate prawns again, and had no reaction. So at any given time, I could develop a new allergy for a day or two, and then it could go away 🙃
MCAS seems especially bad because of the mental block it creates around consuming anything or putting anything on your skin or just existing. Everyone I have interacted with who has it seems to really struggle.
I have mcas too and it’s mainly trigged by medications and not food thankfully. But it’s a gamble every time I take a med, I can be allergic to something one day, then not allergic the next.🤷♀️
My best friend has this!!!!!!! SO SCARY! She was working out at the gym and randomly had an anaphylactic reaction. It’s to random things so she can’t anticipate it. Never seen someone so sick in my life
also even more convoluted, some people have food-dependant exercise-induced anaphylaxis, which is basically "you can eat that food or you can exercise but if you do both you might die"
Just in case you wanted some hope I had pretty severe MCAS but after 3 years of working incredibly hard on my gut health and nervous system I can eat anything I want again! Today was my unhealthiest day ever, I had pizza, pastry, sweets and chocolate (and some veg in the midst of it all). Gluten and cheese have been the biggest wins to me tho. Never thought I'd get those back.
Were you diagnosed? Are you on medication for it? Because sure, working on gut health def helps and… it doesn’t just go away. Even secondary MCAS. Please don’t give people false hope. Most people with MCAS can never have this full a recovery without proper medication.
I’ve been reading about this because I’ve had allergies that have come on randomly and stopped randomly my whole life. But I don’t fit all the other symptoms.
Wait, wait. That's an MCAS thing? I don't have MCAS but I've been diagnosed with "MCAS like symptoms," basically I don't meet all the diagnostic criteria but still exhibit enough symptoms to be notable. I haven't developed random allergies for just a day or two but I've got allergies to various scents that seem to fluctuate day to day, luckily the reaction isn't strong but if it's MCAS related I'm gonna frickin lose it. I swear to god every day I learn that another thing I thought was just a quirk in my body is related to one of the several disorders I've got
I have this and have been in the hospital like 6-7 times in the last year for anaphylaxis. The worst part is I react to anything going in through an IV, even the needle itself causes my arm to swell up real bad. They are really limited on what they can give me too help. I eat nothing but plain white rice, one brand of frozen broccoli, plain baked potato and plain baked chicken.
Sometimes it's something specific, maybe a spice, or the packaging. I'm currently in the hospital and had an allergic reaction to the chocolate pudding. It was mild, so I'm assuming it was an ingredient. My palms, tops of my feet, behind my knees and butt cheeks all got itchy, which is my bodies early warning system. By the time they got a dose approved, my body has worked it through...
Hello!! I am in this club too. And forever terrified of purple carrot (I think it was called that) meal boxes. Although I don't get severe anaphalactic shock, I just get bloating, bad back pain, difficulty breathing, occasional fainting, can't eat for days etc. Do you get anaphalaxis?
Yup, and what’s even worse is when the allergist can’t narrow down what closed your throat and you live a life where your body just might do it again eventually.
I had a 4 year long allergy to coconut thanks to covid. Guess how many things are sold with some derivative of coconut. Guess how much I had to avoid just to be able to breathe normally lmfao
lmfao
Even better? Nothing showed up on the prick test! But I ate a coconut bar right there to prove a point, and needed an epipen. They ran the test FIVE TIMES. NOTHING!!!! insane.
I know a lot of people have had post-COVID complications, but I didn't know MCAS was one of them. It makes sense, but I'm wondering if any studies have been done on it.
It's the only thing I can think of having given it to me because I ate a LOT of coconut products at the time (hence why I had the bar handy) and used it in my shampoo and etc because, yknow, good for hair......nahhhhh had to cut ALL OF palm and coconut out of my diet/habits after my second run of covid (thanks "essential job" )
I'm good now. But I also haven't had covid since 2023 so. Lmfao
I'm glad I'm not on any sustained medications. As soon as I hit 30 I suddenly couldn't eat eggs without having terrible stomach discomfort for the following 8 or so hours and then maybe diarrhea seemingly alongside constipation if I ate more than like 2 eggs.
I think so. I ate a couple egg white quiches the other day and that was fine. I haven't really had much in the way of cakes or other foods where the egg is cooked in as part of the structure, but it does seem to be that it's primarily unadulterated yolks that do me in. Like a scramble, omelet, or deviled eggs.
So true! I was 31 and at work one day and suddenly started to feel heavy pressure on my chest, struggled to breath. Co-worker sitting across me asked if I was ok and told her chest felt compressed. She said I was pure white and lips turning purple. Boss sent me home. Stopped into a Walgreens to get one of those over the counter inhalers as I was really struggling, never experienced it before. Hit the puffer a few times when I got back in my car, then another half dozen times when I got home and didn't seem to do much. Slept in recliner that night, and by sleep, I mean I was just out of it, struggling to breath. Roommate stayed up all night watching me, said I stopped breathing a few times and he had to shake me awake. Ended up in urgent care next day, put on 2 rounds of nebulizer. Doc said I was having severe asthma attack. Since I'd never had asthma before, he called it adult onset asthma, likely triggered by an allergic reaction (still not sure what triggered it.) Doc asked if I had asthma in family history and I said I wasn't aware of any.
Told my mom next day and she blithely said, "well, you know that I had asthma as a child." I said no, you never told me that and she said, "well, I outgrew it so probably didn't think it was important." I now keep emergency inhaler on me at all times.
One Christmas my ex got prawns for me. Awesome 😋! But as I'm eating them I realise I have hives starting on my hands and spreading up my arms as I watch.
Get into the doctor and he's tracking the hives still travelling up my arms and asking me why on Earth I was eating prawns when I'm allergic to seafood. Took a bit for him to realise that I had never had an allergy before and this was not something that had ever happened before, to anything.
So I get rushed next door to the chemist where they shove a shit load of benadryl at me and order me to sit there and wait so they can make sure it's working and the hives don't keep going past all the pen lines on my arms. Eventually it settles down, I'm allowed to go home, and I was too scared to touch seafood for a few years.
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u/TheArtfulLlama 10h ago
It’s so terrifying how allergies can just show up like that out of the blue!