Phew!
Hope your guys stay healthy.
Never seen allergy by touch?
One of my students at UM got a bad reaction while washing some glass items, her forearms got red and swollen. The only thing she was handling that she hadn’t handled on previous days was acetone; I asked whether she’d had similar problems when cleaning around the house or painting her nails (she was one of the few female students who didn’t paint hers); she said yes and I told her it was probably the acetone, that she should check with an allergologist (she could get one free from the Uni’s health center) and next time she cleaned avoid everything with acetone in the list of ingredients.
You can get allergies at the weirdest things. And acetone is even something we produce naturally!
My father was deathly allergic to poison ivy. Me, not so much. He couldn’t get near it to even treat it, so I used to take the push mover to it and just raze it down. Still have no problems.
OTOH, I am highly allergic to cilantro, which basically rules out most mexican restaurants these days. The last time I went to one for dinner, I scanned the menu item I wanted, asked the waitress to make sure it had none, confidently ordered it – to have it arrive with cilantro librally sprinkled on top like lawn clippings. sigh
I love the little Benadryl packets that quick dissolve on the tounge. Best things. Ever. Though I should probably wise up someday an get an epi=pen in case my allergy decides to take the next step.
Uh, the standard advice with a food allergy is NOT “eat the food anyway then use the epipen”. That advice would result in a fair number of dead patients.
The standard advice is “avoid the food. Keep the epipen around in case of accidental exposure”.
(my kid has a known peanut allergy and we keep epipens around just in case but we avoid them religiously).
As I remember from my First Responder training years ago the most common “symptom” with almost any serious problem is denial.
Nah, that crushing chest pain isn’t serious, it will stop after awhile.
Nope ain’t going to worry about a little thing like vomiting blood, it will stop after awhile.
It’s not a bad cut, I’ll just use these 17 bandaids and some duct tape and I’ll be OK.
Picunurse, good luck to you and your hubby.
Yikes. Glad to hear he’s doing okay now.
A friend’s brother had a similar episode a few years back - shrimp or some kind of shellfish, if I recall. It’s pretty scary to think that a life-threatening allergic reaction can pop up out of nowhere like that.
Oh, how scary. I’m glad you’re getting proper testing done.
(My kid is nut-allergic and we carry Epi-Pens, though she’s never had an anaphylactic reaction, thank heavens. It’s our insurance. Benadryl too. We avoid nuts very carefully, but accidents happen.)
Oh no… I hope both of your husbands get better quickly featherlou and picunurse.
Shirley Ujest 10 hours seems pretty standard at the moment. Just a couple weeks ago I had the flu and though I maybe should have gone to the doctor or the emergency [sub]one morning I woke up hardly able to breathe so I used my inhaler which helped[/sub] I didn’t go because I didn’t want to sit in a hallway, plus the only medicenter I knew of I could get to was only open while I was at work [sub]can’t miss work… no real sick leave for me[/sub] so if I was going to miss work I may as well go to my family doctor [sub]I’m lucky I have one.[/sub]
I was glad I didn’t go because every emergency room was crammed in the city according to the the news on Monday night when I was over the worst of it. They were saying it was more like a 13 hour wait then, and 24 hours to be admitted if you needed to stay longer.
I am allergic to tree nuts - I nearly died from my throat swelling shut when I was 2 years old from a raspberry walnut cake on Christmas eve. My allergy has lessened over time, to the point where I just get really itchy at the points of contact with tree nuts. Peanuts are legumes, they don’t bother me. Almonds are actually more closely related to peach pits, so those don’t bother me either. Cashews are not a problem as well, but I don’t know why. This is the order in which they bother me:
Brazil nuts - the worst - still get some swelling from these besides intense itching
Hazelnuts - close second
Walnuts - third, enough that I avoid them and get angry at people who put them in cookies or brownies without saying anything. My ex-mother-in-law used to do it on purpose, I swear. She put walnuts in every dessert she ever made, even jello, ferchrissakes, even though she knew I couldn’t eat them, and wouldn’t bother to mention she had.
Pecans - mild reaction, and every once in a while, I will eat a turtle and just deal with the desire to eat sand paper afterwards (to scratch my mouth and throat.)
Best of luck to your hubby - hope he figures out what the exact issue was! I mentioned the raspberry cake - well, I spent my childhood thinking I was allergic to raspberries, not nuts.
When I was a Cub Scout I broke out in hives whenever I handled my Pinewood Derby car. It must have been something in the paint we used that year, because I’d never had that problem before or since (even with the same car years later). The worst thing about it was that during the Derby no one else was allowed to touch your car, so every race I had to place the car on the track myself, then pick it up afterwards. By the end of the Derby I was itching like crazy, and couldn’t wait to get home to the Calomine lotion.
Wow, that’s scary. Glad everyone is better.
I used to think I had terrible allergies to dust, pollens and certain chemicals because I would have terrible coughing fits. A couple times I got so short of breath and wheezy that I thought I would have to go to the hospital but I never did because I’m a big cheap chicken. When I also started breaking out in hives everyday I finally had myself allergy tested and had breathing tests. I am indeed very allergic to dust (dust mites) but I am not allergic to anything else, I have asthma and all the other things that bothered me are asthma triggers. The hives were due to my body just being screwed up and making flimsy cells with too much histamine (Chronic Idiopathic Urticaria). Now I have two anti-histamines that I take daily, plus an emergency inhaler. Even with that I still sometimes get hives or get itchy and was given the okay to take a 3rd antihistamine (OTC) when needed.
By the way, when I was having hives I would use topical benedryl and my allergist said this was not a good idea because it actually makes you hypersensitive and becomes less effective - or some such thing, maybe one of the docs could explain better. So be careful about using topical benedryl too much.
Peanuts are legumes and different from tree nuts. I developed my allergy to nuts when I was around 30. My throat closes up and it becomes hard to breath but Benedryl takes care of it, thank god. I thought that peanuts were included in the nut family until I met my new neighbors whose daughter is deathly allergic to only tree nuts but peanuts are OK.
With the kind of reaction your hubby had I’d suggest getting him tested for other allergies and getting an epipen. Our neighbors said that if their daughter shakes hands with someone who had picked up nuts that she starts to have a reaction.
I also developed a late-in-life allergy to raw apples. I can have applesauce, apple pies and apple juice but there is something in raw apples that closes up my throat. So no caramel apples rolled in walnuts for me. 
I, too, am allergic to tree nuts. And it drives me crazy that people think peanuts = nuts.
No. People who are allergic to one are very often allergic to the other. But, no. Not the same thing.
However, peanut and nut allergies tend to get worse with each exposure. This is not the same thing as “growing out of” or “developing” an allergy – you can be allergic to peanuts or nuts and never know it because your reaction is so mild… until you get enough exposures that it starts becomming more severe. Not something you can “develop an immunity to” from desensitization exposure, either. (all possible with other types of allergies)
That is how I learned of my tree nut allergy – I’d occasionally get nasty rashes, that kept getting worse. Dr. finally diagnosed food allergy, and then got tested to narrow it down, but it explained away a whole lot of inexplicable rashes from childhood. I haven’t had breathing issues from eating nuts (yet). My nephew, however, is much more allergic to tree nuts than I, and at 4-years got a rash and swollen throat from just touching the first nut he was going to eat.
Seafood allergies also tend to have this “worse with each exposure” progression. So advice to a shellfish allergic to eat shrimp and carry an epi-pen is pretty poor, unless you’re trying to kill 'em.
Ladies, I sure hope your husbands get well quick. It’s scary, isn’t it? I’ve been extremely worried about mine lately.
I think he is trying to kill himself slowly. Either that or he’s really itching to have a fatal heart attack like his father did - he figures two more years - his dad died of one at 52 and he’s turning 50 this year. I don’t know if he’s just given up or what his problem is. But it’s gotten so I’m not even sleeping well at night from worrying… 
My wife had the same thing happen – though I don’t think it was shrimp because she still has no trouble with that. We’d eaten a seafood salad as Alice Fazooli’s that night and by the time we got home she was breaking out in hives like nobody’s business. There were no complications thank goodness, but it was pretty freaky considering it was something neither of us had any experience with.
My son also has severe food allergies. Our story is similar to many of yours, but I did have one bit of advice.
My allergist has warned us about the chance of a biphasic reaction. Which menas that the patient may have a second wave of symptoms several hours after the first reaction. With many ERs having the tendency to “treat 'em and street 'em” this is something we always have to watch for.
I wonder if anyone has written a murder mystery based on this…
Bolding mine.
It’s not an allergy thing, but that’s how my husband nearly died on the kitchen floor - “I’ve been vomiting blood for several days, but I’ll pass it off by saying that I’ve been drinking a lot of blackcurrant cordial (which he had, but still) until it gets to the point where I’ve lost enough blood to nearly pass out”
This happened to me one day at an all-you-can-eat “Crab Crack”. It’s gotten better as I’ve gotten older, but shrimp is so good I put up with the itching. I should probably follow your doctor’s advice, but it’s just so good! :smack:
I always hope that karma will get people like this…