Strange allergies

People in my family have some pretty weird allergies, the worst one being bananas.  I'm lactose intolerant, and that's a pretty common, though really annoying, one.  My poor sister is allergic to pretty much everything, and some pretty weird things at that like peas, watermelon, pumpkins, squash, shellfish...I mean, a ton of stuff.  But one specific allergy my dad, my sister and I all share, and that's bananas. 

 

I can't eat or touch bananas.  In fact, I can't even touch something that has touched a banana. I break out into hives and a rash.  It's pretty weird.  My assistant when I worked for the State ate a banana once for lunch and touched a pen that I then used.  I touched the pen, didn't wash my  hands, rubbed my eyes later and my eye got all puffy and itchy.  Weird. 

 

I discovered this whole thing while working at a daycare in high school.  I cut up bananas for snack, ate half of one and then ended up rubbing my eyes at some point.  My eyes got all swollen and itchy, and then I got some major...well...stomach issues.  Fun.  I knew my Dad was severely allergic to them, but I guess I was, too.  I felt super lucky at that. 

 

I have to be super vigilant when bananas are around.  Aubrey still hasn't eaten one, though she has eaten banana puffs with no problem so I'm assuming she didn't inherit that allergy.  Luckily she can tolerate milk, too. (Thank you for Daddy's healthy genes!)  We didn't even let her have stuff with bananas in them until after her first birthday.  I was worried she would be just like me.  So she we want to have her eat them, because of the benefits they offer, but I'm nervous about it.  I can use gloves to cut them up, or I can have T cut them up and feed them to her.  But making sure we clean her up thoroughly so that she doesn't wipe banana all over me...that's the part I'm nervous about. 

 

We gave strict instructions to her daycare about the banana thing, and there were a couple times that one of the teachers accidentally wrote down that she had them for a snack since the other kids had them.  Of course, I freaked out, mostly because I had kissed all over her and everything but luckily it was always just a mistake. 

 

So flash forward to Friday....my Office Manager is just awful in keeping a candy dish in her office.  She usually keeps some pretty cheap dollar store candy in it, but I have a sweet tooth so when I'm craving stuff, I hit up the dish.  She had these cheap, chewy fruit candies, and one of them was banana-flavored.  She warned me about it, but I was all "oh, they don't really have that in them...I eat banana runts and have no problems."  So I promptly ate quite a few of them (stress eating...).  And wouldn't you know, 3:00 p.m. hit, and I started noticing I was itching and breaking out all over.  Um...oops?  T and I decided to leave work early so I showed him my stupid mistake when he picked me up, to which he promptly told me how stupid that was (yeah, I knew that already), and then my throat started to swell.  We hit up a CVS and I doped up on Benadryl.  But man...that was kind of scary.  And I have to say, that was not one of the brightest things I have ever done.  So note to self:  even cheap banana candy has some hint of the fruit in it.  Do. Not. Eat.  Ever. 

 

Just mark that up on lessons learned, right?