I was diagnosed with food allergies at the age of 13, after consuming soy milk and and going into anaphylactic shock. I was covered head to toes in hives, I felt like I was swallowing sandpaper, and I couldn't seem to get enough air in my body. I blacked out and woke up in my bedroom. You see, we didn't know I had food allergies at the time, so when I complained of feeling odd at dinner, my parents didn't think much of it, and sent me up to bed. I was annoyed, but when I got to the point that I felt something was really wrong, I tried my hardest to get out of bed and get to the stairs and tell him. Needless to say, I didn't make it out of bed.

Realistically, that reaction should have killed me. I am very lucky that it didn't. But that reaction is what landed me in the Ear, Nose, and Throat office at the hospital and meeting the allergist for the first time. I got a full panel of scratch tests done on my back, and I was told to sit and wait fifteen minutes before they did the analysis. Fifteen minutes passed, and the doctor came to look at my back and I can still hear the "Oh my God!" from the nurse. That's how I knew it was bad.

Up to 15 million Americans have food allergies, meaning that 1 in 13 children (under 18) have them. Despite this fact, there is still a lot of dispute, especially among the public school system about how to handle children with food allergies. For example, I am highly allergic to peanut butter. My allergy has gotten 200% worse since I was initially diagnosed which means that I am even more sensitive to it now. However, through high school I was sent repeatedly to the Emergency Room with an allergic reaction because of people refusing to respect my allergy. Many times parents will say that they shouldn't have to help accommodate another student's allergy because it isn't their child and therefore not their problem. But I would like to take a moment to explain why my food allergy IS your problem.

Anaphylaxis (severe reactions, which can be deadly) can become life threatening within three to thirty minutes. One epi-pen shot gains you about ten minutes of keeping the reaction from entirely closing off your airway, in most cases. That's right, epi-pens aren't guaranteed to work especially when reactions are highly severe. They are meant to gain time until an ambulance can arrive and start a line of steady antihistamines. So if the train of thought is that "Well, they can just use an epi-pen and be fine, right?", you're incorrect.

There are 24 hours a day, and the chances are that you will not spend all 24 of them around someone who has a severe food allergy. So use the time that you aren't around me to eat the things that could potentially kill me. I don't care if my friends want to eat peanut butter by the handful and wash it down with soy milk in their dorm, as long as they wash up well before they see me again. The only person in my life for whom consuming my allergens is completely off limits, is my significant other when I have one.

Often times people have the misconception that food allergies are just people "being picky". This is so wrong. Yes, there are some people out there who will excuse their not liking a food by claiming to be allergic to it, but you shouldn't assume that every person who says that they have an allergy is picky. I don't eat eggplant because I'm picky, I don't eat peanut butter balls because it will kill me. Ask any one of my family members or my friends who have had to sit with me in the Emergency Room while I am hooked up to an IV of medicine for 3 hours while they watch to make sure the reaction doesn't come back and cause me to stop breathing, I don't do this for fun.

We didn't choose these conditions, we understand that you may be frustrated by having to put off eating your granola bar another 20 minutes because we're around. But also understand that whenever I am at a pot-luck event, or a cook out at a friend's house, I am constantly worried that I will touch something, or get too close to something, and have to go to the hospital. This isn't us trying to make anyone else's life harder, this is us putting our life first because it is put in danger more frequently than most other people's.

My food allergy is your problem, unless you want to be the person who has to live with the fact that I could have/ did die because you refused to wait to eat your snack.