It was a surprise to see that this was food allergies awareness month!
Why the surprise?
A lot of folks do not know that one can be allergic to certain foods.
One in five kids in California suffers from skin rashes triggered by some form of food allergies, is what I was told by a doctor a few years ago.
This post took a long time to get out, not because I did not want to write about food allergies, but because it brings too many bad memories. With work getting way too busy and the overall concern for the state of the household moving forward into the next six to nine uncertain months, the last thing to do was a deep dive into the brain to go over memories better left repressed!
It is food allergies awareness month and what has to be shared will hopefully make many people open their eyes to this problem.
When baby Sundaram was around four plus years old and was put in first grade at the local school, there was lot of stress. There was also a lot of playing around with balls made of tar(pitch) from the road laying machines, frogs, insects and plants in the backyard. More than anything, there was all those kadalai urundais (Caramelized peanuts) and ellu urundais (sesame seed balls) with a liberal dose of bajjis made using Nallennai (gingelly oil)!
These were days before we had the Palmolein and Sanola in late seventies India and that was precisely the first time, baby Sundaram got what was diagnosed as "Karappan", which in English that we know now is a form of Eczema.
Life takes a different turn as this mild irritation gets complicated by an allergy for Sulpha drugs (which were given to treat the problem) and pus filled blisters appear all over the body, especially where the hair follicles are. White fresh school uniforms worn in the morning come back from school with blood and pus stains all over. There is a fear among other students as well as among other parents and the kid is forced by one and all to stay home.
The sulfa drugs having backfired badly, and the typical soframycin type creams prescribed not doing anything, the family doctor actually suggested some "siddha" medicine which seemed to have better results in cases like this.
So, the parents take the kid to what was (dont know if it still is!) the Raja Rajeshwari Siddha Vaidhya Nilayam and we go meet a 90 year old Siddhar, who is puffing away on his cigarette! He takes one look at the kid and gives him some Thanga baspam (gold powder) to be mixed with honey and taken twice a day and an amazing goop called "neer-adi-muththu" (pearl from the bottom of the water is the translation).
The parents take turns applying this goop over the boils and after two months things take a turn for the better and everything is forgotten. There are a few "porukkus" (scabs) here and there, and once in a while there is a patch of hair from the head that just falls down with a scab, but a five year old doesn't know anything and is happy to get on with life.
Things take a routine and almost every alternate year, there is a mild recurrance of the boils, but they subside after one or two show up. The parents have also figured out by now that putting the kid on a Thayir saadam diet (rice and yogurt) seems to work wonders for his skin problems. They have also learned to let the kid pick his food.
Let's talk about that. If a kid with food allergies instinctively stays away from certain foods, but eats other foods, the parents have a couple of options:
a. force feed the kid, stuff he/she is trying to avoid
b. berate the child for being a picky eater and then force feed the kid
c. understand something funny is going on and check (after all who doesnt like Mangoes? or ellu urundais?)
Well, b. was the default option, till my grandpa defended me. He just told everyone to back off. If the kid did not want it, he did not want it. He ate the bananas and apples didn't he?
Today, there is another option
d. Get the kid allergy tested!
When I was in seventh grade, somehow the dormant blisters came out full strength. It was mind boggling. I would have blisters everywhere. Couldnt stand, sit, lie down. To this day, no one knows if food triggered it, or if it was some bacterial infection (along the steph lines) that did not have a cure. Western medicine left me for dead. Anything the local doctors tried only made it worse.
Again, we went to the Siddhar who was now nearing 100 and was still sucking on his cigarette! He looked at the blisters, took my pulse, pulled up my eyelids and looked into my eye and declared "raththa sudhdhi illai!" (blood is not pure!) and gave some instructions to his assistant.
Out came two things, which I will take to my grave. One was a small bottle with seven markings on it. It was some kind of extreme laxative that would make you stay in the bathroom and not even hold water! Within those seven days, it would make any normal person look like a concentration camp survivor. The second thing was a "thailam" that had to be rubbed over my head in an attempt to cool it down.
All said and done I went from 
to
in less than one year. The second photo is after the recovery and back to school going days.
The intermediate stages were not worth being photographed! (Now that we have Google, did image searches on skin blisters to show San what it looked like and found the pictures for "folliculitis" , right top picture is a match!)
After that episode in seventh standard (where 3 months were spent in bed), the rest of school went by without any events. By then the family and extended family adjusted to my special eating habits. Almost on a routine basis however, there would be skin rashes, itching, severe headaches and migraines.
That is when my dad came out of the allergy closet and told my mother "when I was a kid I also had similar skin problems". Till my seventh grade he never admitted that he passed on anything negative to me. When little Sundi repeated ten digit numbers from memory, there would be the "that is my boy! He has my genes" speech.
Don't blame my dad though. He probably was suppressing such memories also, only to find them catching up with him thirty odd years later! He taught me the greatest trick though. When the pain hits the lower back of the head right above the neck, he would ask me to dring a lot of hot water (no salt, nothing). Just a lot of hot water! and wait for three to four minutes.
It would make me throw up violently. Drink more water, more vomitting , and keep going for another 15-20 minutes till your eyes water, you have nothing else in your stomach and you feel absolutely fresh. It is almost like the whole world suddenly turned beautiful! Have experienced this so many times that somehow the stigma of throwing up like that is gone.
This was followed by four years of sumptuous feasting in various mess halls in Banaras. Every now and then there would be a throbbing headache and the hot water trick would always work like a charm!
Before I knew it, college was over and it was graduate school in the USA. That is when Sundar discovered "Peanut butter"! A concept that he had never heard of in India. Have peanuts made into a paste, put some crunchy peanut pieces in the paste, and use it to make a sandwich! Two days of peanut butter sandwiches and it was back to drinking hot water.
The only good news was that one did not have to wait in front of the gas stove for an agonizing five ten minutes to get the water hot. Hot water came readily available from the tap in the land of opportunity! Throwing up was never made easier.
That was also the time this body discovered Cheese Pizza. Wholesome food with no allergic side reactions whatever! Life was good between Pizza's and noodles and the sambar, rasam and curries which were all homemade with Saffola oil!
This glorious time is punctuated by the vegetarian's attempt to try some non vegetarian food (thanks to help from local friends!). A piece of salmon from a friends plate was tried only to be followed by two days of sickness. That pretty much ended the non vegetarian experiment! That was also the time when a doctor in the USA suggested that not all people were able to handle certain foods.
Doc: Why try salmon now?
Me : A friend wanted to know what Salmon tastes like?
Doc: ???? but your friend eats salmon
Me : my friend has been eating salmon since childhood. the idea was to get the perpective of a person who had never tasted it in 23 years of life and see the reaction
Doc: Well you have some reaction, alright! Don't go near seafood in general. You seem to be very allergic.
Me : So I should not try to eat any meat. God designed me to be a vegetarian?
Doc: I said seafood. Obviously you are new to the meatscape. You can try to eat chicken? Chances are your body won't handle red meat as well considering how delicate your stomach is.
Me : Thank you!
That was when I realized "Mera Thayir Saadam Mahaan!"
After staying far away from meat, got married and San came to make my apartment a home. As is customary with any new Indian bride, she went to the local grocery store to buy oil to "eththufy the kudumba vilakku" (light the family lamp) and needless to say she choose "Idhayam Nallennai" (gingelly oil) and she got a large bottle. It was not even close to Deepavali and that meant she was switching over from the Saffola and slightly bitter vegetable oils to the desi Gingelly!
Wham! The migraines hit and they hit hard. The skin also started acting up. The new bride was literally scared. She could not handle her hubby throwing up every alternate day. She knew that the throwing up made him feel better instantly and he used the word "food poisoning" once or twice. She was also tired of the implication of her poisoning him somehow (you know those pesky India phone calls on Sunday morning?).
So we go to a doctor and he pokes ... let's see... a batch of 64 needles in an 8x8 grid dipped in various allergens on my back. Then follows up with injecting 8 little drops into the right hand and 9 into the left hand.
An hour or two later, they read the needle points one by one on a scale of 1 to 4 (4 being severely allergic and 1 being a non issue). Some of the needle prick points have now swollen to the size of grapes! We are scared. The doctor triumphantly declares that Sundar Narayanan , Age 27 has severe food allergies and has been living with it all his life without knowing it! He also suggests that the tests he did were for american plants, american foods, drugs, etc. and considering my diet was Indian food, we should make a trip to India and get tested for Indian food allergens!
On our next trip to Madras, we go to Anna Nagar to a certain "Mahathi" clinic and a doctor there tests me similarly for Indian foods. She gives me a different list..
After cross referencing the American and Indian doctors diagnosis, San and me figure out that Sundar Narayanan, Age 28 can pretty much eat Air without falling sick.. and yes, maybe he can also eat Thayir saadam!
There are apparently ways to get rid of some of these allergies. One includes completely eliminating those foods from the diet and a slow and gradual introduction of that item into the diet to check severity.
When things like Brinjal, Pumpkin (poosanikkai) and Potatoes get cut from a Madrasi's diet, one gets very very irritable (if you dont know what we are talking about here, go read PGW's "The Nodder" , a small story in Blandings Castle and you need no more explaining).
Finally after this purgatory period (which was a more dignified version of the liquid from 7th standard), it was found that the only two allergies that mattered or which stayed were
a. sesame seeds
b. peanuts
There were others like Seafood (which were taboo and we didn't care) Mango, strawberries etc. (which were disliked instinctively) that didn't make a difference.
For the last 8 years, this house has not had peanut oil or sesame oil in the house. If it is used, it is done on separate vessels.
All near and dear ones know this at home and at work. People who come back from Europe or even Israel (with candy labels in Hebrew) tell me if there is peanuts on the candy and ask me to stay away!
One good thing is, the hot water treatments are now few and far between!
Another good thing is that in the US, the ingredients are always nicely labeled and there is no risk of buying something from a store and eating it by mistake. The only risk is when going to some restaurant and they use sesame oil to cook but dont tell the customers when you ask them what oil they use!
There have also been two new additions to this house over the last eight years and that goes back to "what it means to live with food allergies".
When I heard the MIL pray out loud after Jr. got a skin rash "please god, let not Jr. take after her dad", it sent me to pieces. Turned out that the chlorine in the swimming pool had irritated her skin (this was shortly after her first swimming lessons). So far she is not allergic to any foods or medicines.
Again when the Little one developed dry skin, the same prayers (this time from San and her mom)! The little one does take after me a lot and so far she is not allergic to food, but has very weak skin. So she is being watched for the food she picks.
So far, she has not developed any strong recurring dislike for any food. That is also a good sign.
A lot of friends ask "how do you live with this?" and the answer is quite simple
"Carefully"
With a little watchfulness on the ingredient list and some practice, peanuts and sesame seeds are dealt with!
At least I was lucky enough to find out what caused problems. A lot of people have to spend years to find out!
So, a final piece of advice to parents out there. Food allergies are very common and are usually not severe. However, if you suspect something, give your kid the benefit of doubt and let him/her avoid certain foods. If in their adult life they outgrow those allergies, they might start eating those foods anyways, but you will spare them the sickness!
Also people who are allergic to plants, chemicals may also be highly succeptible to food allergies (a doc told me this). So if your kid's eyes start watering when they play with a dog or cat, they are probably allergic and that means there is a chance they are allergic to certain foods also and is worth checking out.
Links to previous posts here, here and here!
ps. thanks to Tharini for staring this thread and to Boo for reminding me to write!
pps. for those of you who wonder why a guy so deep rooted in Western science has a healthy love for eastern science, the "daadi" saamiyaar (bearded ascetic) as he is rememebered in our familiy, was one of the best doctors we have met! He just sat there in padmasana in his loin cloth, chain smoking at 90+ years old... but he was one hell of a doctor!
ppps. When writing about something this close to my heart, there is no proof reading and I type as fast as one can think. So this post was corrected for typos today!
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Sunday, December 14, 2008 at 12:56AM 
