What’s that smell? Episode 2

<-episode 1

Once upon a time there was a boy called Louis. A cute, blond little boy (yes, I know… the years have not been kind!) who lived in Oxford with his parents and his sister. A slightly solitary but mostly content boy; as long as he wasn’t crying out in pain… I have to start this post in the years before I had memories; largely reliant on the famously unreliable source of parental hearsay. The reason for that is that I found out that I was allergic to milk well before I had truly ‘comprehended’ anything.

To my surprise, I have found out things that I didn’t know in researching for this particular post. Specifically that I was brought up on a dairy-free diet before anyone had realised that I might be allergic. I turns out that my parents had given up dairy not long before I was born. My mum, having heard a compelling presenter on Radio Oxford talking about dairy intolerance, had linked the symptoms with my dad’s lethargy that commonly followed his cheese and bread lunchtime diet. One that became all the more appealing living just down the road from the most delicious bakers. So I wouldn’t have known (or certainly not so clearly) that I had an allergy when I first started weaning.

I also had the impression that my mum had been frustrated with the lack of medical support in diagnosing my allergy. Back in the mid-80s food allergies and intolerances were not unheard of but much less commonplace than they are now. However, my memory of this seems to have been confused with her own lack of support, a generation length before. She had suffered from asthma and had been fairly belittled by a doctor at the suggestion that she may have identified a link between that and dairy. As a result, when it became clear I may be struggling with reactions to food, so sure was she of the link that I was never taken down a medical diagnosis route.

My first memory of having an allergy was the horrific ear aches that I used to get. We learnt, through misfortune, that they would strike nearly exactly 24 hours after consuming a milk product. And they were bad. Really bad. I remember just having to lie in a dark room for hours in agony. I would fear those episodes. I can’t imagine how my parents felt (or at least I didn’t used to be able to).

Strangely, I don’t remember any of the more common symptoms of milk allergies: stomach pains, digestive issues, wind, unusual stools etc… Only ear aches. But that was enough. It meant I grew up as a child with a clear awareness of the risks of food. It has only struck me recently how genuinely difficult this was. These were the days before allergen menus, before allergens being highlighted in bold on food packaging, before any real need to know your allergens. This meant that I had to become my own allergen glossary from a young age. I had to know that ‘whey’, ‘lactose’, ‘butter’, ‘cream’, ‘cheese’ etc… all meant milk. Not just to look out for these things myself, but to educate others who might be feeding me.

Children’s birthday parties stick out as particularly painful memories. What should have been care-free joyous celebrations became exercises in food ingredient detective work. Platters of kid’s party food became minefields of possible but cautious option. I was the kid who would ask whether any of the food wrappers were still around in order to check the ingredients; not the best way to become popular! You also have to learn to expect the bizarre false positives: people who have catered for your allergy only to be surprised that you can’t eat chocolate or cheese because they contain milk. I sound bitter at these people. I’m not; it’s simply the situation. They didn’t and weren’t expected to know any better. I never ever knew anyone try and deliberately sabotage my diet. They just didn’t understand the limits and consequences. Interestingly, it was such children’s parties that helped lead my diagnosis. The reactions that always followed such events being clearly linked to the ‘different’ food I was eating outside the protection of home.

This was also well before the days of commercial influence of allergies on restaurants. There were no ‘dairy-free’ options when I was a child. Again another false memory: I had assumed that this was the reason that we didn’t eat out as a family. Both my dad and my mum, however, have pointed out that this was much more likely a result of a quirk of my family at the time. A reluctance to pay someone else to cook for them, a want for control over their food, a cultural reluctance to court the capitalist world of the service industry, any of these but apparently not the fact that we didn’t eat dairy!

Whatever the weighting of factors, the point is we didn’t eat out. I do mean that quite literally: I clearly remember eating in a restaurant for the first time as a late teenager. I felt like a complete alien sat there, placing an order, asking for clarity on what I might be able to eat, choosing a drink, choosing the correct cutlery, being waited on etc… It took many years to get used to this; it was just a major part of childhood that I missed. Aged about 20, I remember clearly going for a first date with my now-wife in York and being so nervous! Not so much for the thought that I would be bad company, or that she wouldn’t like me, or whether I should try to kiss her at the end of the evening. But just for being found out as a complete fraud at having taken her out for a meal and not having a clue what I was meant to be doing… Discussing this years later, I failed miserably at pretending I knew what I was doing it transpires; but it didn’t affect how the date went. (Apparently, it counts as being brave when you face your fear to impress a girl; even if that fear is not knowing the procedural and cultural norms of eating in a restaurant).

Anyway, I’m jumping ahead of myself. That was university but there are intermediate allergy steps to fill in the meantime. When I was roughly 16/17, I started challenging some of the diet limitations I’d lived with since childhood. I had, for example, grown up as a vegetarian but found myself questioning whether this was my decision or just a product of my environment. (Chicken curry. That was the meal that temped me to the other side if you’re wondering. And contrary to many people’s stories I was really quite disappointed with bacon when I first tried it). I also found that I didn’t seem to get the acute reactions to milk that I used to have. In fact, I found as I weened myself back on to it that it didn’t seem to have too much of a reaction at all. If I had something strong like cream or cheese then I might find that I got a bit of a coldy/mucusy reaction but having never developed a taste for cheese/cream/butter/pure milk this wasn’t much of a problem.

As a result, by the time I got to university, I didn’t really limit my milk intake at all. I would eat chocolate and ice cream and pastries but, through taste as much as anything, would stick away from cream and cheese and milky drinks. Combined with a new-found appetite for meat, this may have had something to do with the fact that I put on quite a lot of weight in my first couple of years at University! Ironically, it was around this time that I started drinking coffee as well (I know, I know… all the poisons at once!). And in hindsight, my best friend and I used to joke that the coffee would offset the lethargy effect of the flapjacks that I would often buy before lectures. The butter making me sleepy and the coffee making me buzz – but never quite in matched quantities and as such I would alternate wildly between barely being awake and bouncing off the ceiling! So I guess I did know at some level that the milk was still having an effect.

It wasn’t until the last few years that I start to look at this a bit more closely. But that’s jumping ahead to the next blog…!

episode 3 ->