Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes…
Like the song, I’ve had a pretty big change in my life recently. I started having symptoms of what I thought was another food allergy. For the record, I was diagnosed with quite a few nut allergies — including a deadly peanut allergy which did not manifest in childhood, oddly enough — and fruit allergies, as well as a few other random ones (latex and wintergreen, I’m looking at you). Fun fact: If you are allergic to either latex or bananas, chances are, you will be allergic to the other one, too. I didn’t know that. I’d known about my latex allergy for years, having worked in foodservice and was forced to wear latex gloves and basically suffer with hives going up my arms every night until they allowed me to start using non-latex gloves later. But the banana allergy took some time to figure out. Anyway, this all happened in my twenties, and I am forty-six now, so it’s been awhile. My symptoms were similar to hay fever: runny nose and tearing eyes, and also some fun digestive issues. (We won’t get into that). So after making a list of the culprit foods (a very varied list, I might add), I went to my allergist and got a scratch test. Which, by the way, is no longer a scratch test but more like a poke test. Anyway, nothing came up as an allergy. She told me that it was possible that these symptoms were due to an intolerance, which…